Missing in Slugterra
by Sabari
Summary: The turtles are teleported to Slugterra for... reasons... and spend a lot of time trying to find each other and also a way home. Non-slash/non-pairing.
1. A Matter of Mind

**_A/N:_**

 _ **Set sometime in season 2 of Slugterra and season 1 of TMNT (2012). It's not that relevant, but I'm mentioning it anyway, because someone might care.  
**_

 _ **It's also probably worth it to state clearly that this is mostly about the turtles being in Slugterra, and only a little about the Shane Gang meeting the turtles.**_

 ** _As usual, I'm going to say this story is probably AU, though not especially intentionally so._** ** _As always, this story is completely written. As per usual, I will upload one chapter per day (Barring anything out of the ordinary. I will attempt to give readers a head's up via A/N). This was written for my entertainment, and is being published for yours. If you find yourself not enjoying it, then you should feel perfectly free to stop reading. Heap praise or criticism upon it, whichever may suit you best. Or say nothing about it at all, if you would prefer. Do feel free to point out typos, I check my stories before publishing, but I admit my imperfection and would welcome the opportunity to correct any mistakes I may have made._**

* * *

It is a curious characteristic of most living things that they simply cannot (or at the very least will not) voluntarily acknowledge anything which is sudden at the most crucial moment, instead waiting for a good half second or so before deciding that suddenness happens and has indeed happened. For the especially slow witted, this half second can easily stretch into five or ten seconds, perhaps more.

The first thing to acknowledge sudden and unexpected changes is most often whatever part is responsible for fast reactions to things which are advancing quickly. This is not necessarily ideal, as this part seems wholly unattached to anything resembling logic or reason, and the reaction is not always the needed one and may even be quite a harmful one.

For Raphael, the mutant ninja turtle, the first reaction to anything was to hit it, or preferably stab it. In this case, the "it" in question, turned out to be a very large, green leaf of a perfectly innocent shrub. The leaf itself had, of course, never done anything to merit such treatment and (assuming leaves are capable of harboring such feelings) was probably quite put out about it. The shrub might even have been very offended. Its occupant certainly was.

A high pitched squeak of protest was accompanied by a slight splat as a small, squishy reddish thing dropped to the ground. Raph blinked at it without any real comprehension. It didn't look like anything he'd seen before, and so he was slow to process what it was he was looking at.

He'd seen a lot of misshapen blobs, most of them hideously ugly and incredibly vicious, but this looked neither malformed nor especially dangerous. It was an inch or two tall, reddish on the back, bluish on the front, with a distinct head and large eyes that gazed up indignantly at the monster that had just gone about demolishing its abode (or at the very least its perch).

Raph got on appallingly with people, but really rather well with most animals, especially small ones that weren't of the fuzzy, cuddly variety. He knelt down to get a closer look at the creature.

"What are you... some kind of slug?" Raph queried, putting away his sai so he could pick the thing up.

It promptly tried to bite him, then it squelched at him. Its large eyes were critical, it was evidently very offended by either Raph's approach to it or else to the leaf it had up until recently been sitting on.

"Okay, I deserved that," Raph conceded, something he never would have done with any person (or if any person had been present to bear witness), "But I'm really not such a bad guy."

The slug continued to squelch at him. It had never seen anything like him and wasn't about to take him at his word. When people claimed they weren't "such a bad guy", they very often were precisely what they said they weren't, and this particular slug knew that all too well.

Raph, for his part of the exchange, ignored it. It had suddenly dawned on him that he was very much alone, and also that this place, though clearly underground, was very much (if not entirely) unlike home.

In fact, the more he looked at it, the more certain he was that this was like no place he'd ever been. While it was a cave of sorts, and had things which were identifiably plants and rocks, nothing looked at all familiar.

Raph knew his world experience was somewhat limited, but he didn't expect that even his brother Donatello knew this place or anything in it.

Most curious of all were the slugs, who peered from every conceivable nook and cranny, all highly interested in this abrupt newcomer, yet cautious. They thought they were hidden in the shadows or under leaves, behind rocks or even hanging down from above, but Raph spotted them in droves.

Whatever these creatures might be, they were not ninja and had no idea how to hide from one.

Raph wasn't sure whether to be reassured or unsettled by the fact that the creatures, odd looking as they were to him, seemed to think he was the bizarre one in this scenario.

But what did really unsettle him was the realization that not one of his brothers -not Leonardo, not Donatello, not even Michelangelo- were here with him. He wasn't sure what the implications of that were, but he did know with grave certainty that he didn't like them (the implications) at all.

Raph remembered clearly that, moments before, he had been embroiled in battling the Kraang alongside his brothers in a Kraang building they'd found. He'd been thrown, and then a blinding flash of light... and then he'd come to be here. He felt that he could be forgiven for having stabbed the first thing that moved in front of him, seeing as the last thing that had been in front of him had been trying to kill him. But he didn't expect the slug to understand that.

The slug had continued to squelch at him all through his thought process.

"Well," Raph said aloud to himself, "I guess I better find a way out of here. Or try to find my brothers," he looked at the slug, "You don't know the way out of this cave, do you?"

To his surprise, the slug straightened perceptibly, squeaked eagerly and nodded its head, which bobbled disconcertingly atop its small body. It flapped little appendages that resembled arms, asking to be picked up. Raph held out his hand and the slug hopped onto it without hesitation.

It continued to gibber at him, now quite enthusiastic for reasons Raph wasn't sure of.

He was kind of surprised to find that the slug really wasn't slimy, which made him question his theory that it was a slug. In his experience, slugs were invariably slimy. And they very seldom talked or showed any interest in people. Come to think of it, they generally didn't have distinct limbs or heads or disconcertingly human-like mouths complete with teeth.

Still, mutants aside from himself were not unknown to Raph, so he surmised that maybe this was just a mutant slug of some kind. Still, it nagged at him that the creature didn't look at all mutated, in fact it looked as though every piece of it was meant to be that way. And there were hundreds of slugs just (or at least mostly) like it.

Some crouched or skittered away when Raph neared them, others gaped up (or down, depending on their position) at him, evidently without any kind of fear. They seemed emboldened by the fact that he was now carrying one of their number, as though this signified to them that he was not, in fact, dangerous.

Raph wondered if he ought to tell them that turtles very often ate slugs. He decided not to.

The slug in his hand gestured urgently with its limbs, pointing toward what Raph guessed must be the exit. He offered to let it ride on his shoulder, an offer it accepted with a degree of excitement that baffled him. Then, keeping one hand on a sai, Raph set off in the indicated direction.

Though the cavern seemed largely empty aside from slugs and plants, Raph kept to the shadows, uneasily aware of how few exits he had. While there was a plethora of places to hide, there were no visible escape routes, and that made him nervous. A ninja always wants at least ten viable -if non-obvious- escape routes, though in a pinch four or five will do. Raph had none, and he didn't like it.

Were his brothers also here? He wondered.

* * *

Leonardo, at the very least, had also arrived in Slugterra, though of course he didn't know the name of the place. He too quickly recognized that he was underground. However, he was not alone.

Leo had the unfortunate distinction of having been deposited directly in the main street of a town. A town whose residents were currently in hiding, though Leo didn't know that. All he knew was that he was looking at a truly alarming number of buildings, and he was nowhere near being hidden among them.

Before he could go about concealing himself in a respectable manner, the ground began to vibrate beneath his feet. Small stones in the street danced, and something that sounded upsettingly like a herd of wild animals charging toward him came from a cloud of rising dust.

Leo already had one katana drawn and now he tightened his grip on it in preparation for whatever was coming. There was no time to seek cover. Aside from which, Leo was uncertain whether such cover as he desired existed. The short huts lining the street provided little concealment, and the cave floor in his vicinity was distressingly open and lacking in shadows.

As the dust cleared, Leo was rather stunned to find himself looking at three big, metal creatures. For a moment he thought the mechanical beasts were operating independently, but he quickly realized that they were in possession of riders. This didn't really make him feel any better.

The long claws and spikes along the necks of the mechanized beasts didn't make him feel terribly secure, the sharp teeth especially set him on edge. He didn't want to find out if these things could crack his shell or not.

 _Easy, Leo,_ he admonished himself, _Maybe they're friendly._

The one in the middle stepped forward, and it didn't look friendly.

"What the heck are you?" asked the thing's rider, "Some kind of giant slug?"

"I'm not a slug!" Leo snapped, bristling.

No one had ever before suggested he was a slug. He was accustomed to being accused of being a gecko (as well as assorted other types of lizard), a frog and someone wearing a costume. These insults he took very much in stride. But the suggestion that he was a slug was simply too much.

"Well whatever you are," the rider said, pulling out a rather menacing looking blaster, "You're in our way!"

Here, at last, was something Leo understood. Through absolutely no fault of his own, he was about to be fighting for his life. This was something he had come to expect when it came to meeting new people. They always seemed to think that he ought to be slightly more dead than was his preference.

But this moment of everything making sense to him was short lived.

The blaster fired, as expected. Something exited the barrel, also as expected. And it was no surprise that the thing headed right towards him. What took him totally by surprise was that it was... well... alive. With a startled yelp, Leo chose to duck rather than block the attack, and the thing flew past his head, embedded itself in the ground and subsequently exploded, knocking Leo off his feet.

Lying on his belly, rather stunned, Leo observed as a small creature went hopping past his face on a determined journey towards the rider of the mechanized beast. To Leo, it resembled nothing so much as a slug with an oddly cheeky grin on what was unquestionably its face.

Leo's scrambled brain informed him that this was clearly a product of his imagination. Slugs did not grin. They did not hop. They did not have distinct faces. And they certainly were _never_ fired from blasters.

Leo's perception of what he was seeing and what he was certain must be refused to reconcile. They were still fighting violently as he stood up, dusted himself off- and promptly found himself diving off to the left to avoid a flaming ball of something aimed at his head.

One thing both his imagination and his logical mind agreed on, he was definitely in trouble.

With a mechanized whine, two more blasters (wielded by the two other riders) came into play, and suddenly the air was alive with zinging, flying things that all seemed to be intending to hit Leo, or at the very least explode uncomfortably close to him.

He was rapidly coming to the conclusion that, wherever he was, he didn't enjoy being here and would very much like to depart as quickly as possible, if only he could find some shadows to hide in.

But this cave (if that's what it was) was maddeningly well lit. It also seemed as if the inhabitants (if that's what was attacking him) were very much opposed to the notion of him going anywhere.

An explosion went off in front of Leo and he was thrown off his feet again. He decided that he'd had enough of this running about and being shot at. With a growl, he got to his feet.

"Alright, you want to play rough?" He hissed, gripping his katana, "Let's do this."

With that, he charged for the nearest monster robot.


	2. Home Invasion

"Ow!" Michelangelo was rather used to existing in a world he didn't understand, but the lights abruptly going out and then banging his shins on what felt like a coffee table where none had been before was a bit on the outside, even for him.

Mikey lost his balance and fell on his face, cursing the darkness in blatant disregard for what some wise person had said about candles (he was fairly certain the darkness was responsible for the coffee table suddenly being in his path), and then found himself staring into a very bright, very small, very slightly blue light, behind which was a very upset, very alien face.

Mikey immediately screamed like a little girl, leaped backward to his feet and smashed into some piece of furniture he elected not to spend any time trying to identify. His scream was echoed by the little alien face, and the bright light jigged away as the thing skittered under the coffee table to avoid Mikey's feet.

"Ah ha!" a switch clicked and a light went on overhead.

Yelping in the sudden brightness, Mikey staggered in a new direction, this time tripping over a television set and landing on his face again. A variety of small squeals accompanied his fall, and a series of little things he didn't have time to think about went hopping across the floor.

Immediately, Mikey was on his feet, looking around wildly for a sheltered place to hide. Unfortunately, he discovered that he was surrounded. He looked up, hoping for some rafters, but all he found was a stairwell, occupied by a human with a rather complex looking gun. Looking up the muzzle of the thing, Mikey noticed a small creature grinning at him, and it seemed to be having thoughts of violence.

Mikey immediately and without question accepted the use of live animals as ammunition, as it was not far beyond things which he had not only experienced, but routinely imagined. Casting about himself, Mikey spotted one of the little animals trying to conceal itself beneath the coffee table. He picked it up and waved it at the person on the stairs.

"Hold your fire!" Mikey shouted, "Or the slug gets it."

He was bluffing, of course. The moment he'd picked it up, the slug had squeaked pitifully, and brought out every last bit of empathy in Mikey's soft heart. He wanted to reassure it that he really wouldn't hurt it, but only wanted to defend himself from the very angry collection of people surrounding him.

There were four in all; two humans and two... well, one of them was a mole. Possibly a mutant mole, but a mole nonetheless. The other one was... well... blue. And that's really all Mikey knew for certain.

If Mikey had made that threat to any other people in all of Slugterra (for that's where he was, though he didn't know it), it probably would not have worked. But he had the fortune (or misfortune, depending upon how one chose to view it) of having crashed into the Shane Hideout.

"Put down the slug," growled the person on the stairs, eyes narrowed and gun most definitely not being lowered, "Right. _Now_."

"Why don't _you_ put down _your_ slug... er... slugs," Mikey tried to demand.

He cast wary glances at the other people in the room, but they neither moved nor said anything. The leader was the one on the stairs. Mikey had assumed this to be the case merely because he was standing higher up than the others, which of course doesn't make sense except to someone like Mikey. But it appeared that he was correct.

"You're the one who invaded our home!" came the fierce retort.

"This is your home?" Mikey looked around, "Cool... it's like my home. Only less slimy."

"Forget that!" the leader snarled, "Put down my slug!"

"Why? So you can shoot me? No thanks!" Mikey replied.

"Joules."

Mikey didn't have any time to wonder what that word spoken by the leader meant, because he rather abruptly received a considerable shock, which not only caused him to drop the slug, but also to fall on his face for the third or fourth time in the last few minutes. The electric shock made him twitch and he stared in disbelief at the slug he'd dropped, which now proceeded to scurry across the floor in a way that didn't really seem physically possible (that Mikey was thinking this let him know he'd received a more powerful shock than he'd first realized, as this was a thought more worthy of Donnie than him).

Mikey sat up, rubbing the back of his head, certain that he could smell smoked turtle.

"Ow," he commented, amending it with, "That wasn't cool, dude."

The slug had by this time ascended the stairs and hopped into the hand of the person waiting there.

"Now," the leader said very carefully, putting this slug in the chamber of his blaster and taking careful aim, "Who are you, and what are you doing in this place?"

* * *

For Donatello, the change of venue was not at first particularly apparent. He had been surrounded by Kraang before, and he was surrounded by Kraang now. The only real difference, which it took both him and the Kraang a moment to notice, was that the Kraang were now surrounded by... well, henchmen.

A high, shrieking growl split the air moments before the sharp report of a blaster being fired. A squeal of alarmed Kraang followed, and Don found himself suddenly uncertain as to who was trying to kill him more, the henchmen with their goggles or the Kraang with their squid/brain bodies.

In any case, Don dove for the nearest possible cover, a large boulder.

The air was shortly filled with laser beams, and all sorts of things that Don could not identify nor entirely reconcile as having been fired from the henchmen's blasters. Big, horrible, slavering beasts with large, disturbingly sharp fangs flew from one side to the other, all making their way towards the Kraang, who were dead set on the idea of avoiding their unfriendly advances.

"Kraang does not enjoy being what is called attacked in this place," remarked a Kraang to another.

"Nor does Kraang enjoy that which is called being fired upon in the place which is called this place."

Don already had it clear that the Kraang were vile and repulsive and also evil, but he didn't feel at all reassured by the other side of the conflict who, if anything, seemed even more so.

When a ghoulish beast flew in his direction faster than he could duck, Don held up his staff to defend himself. The creature promptly sank its fangs deep into the wood with a sickening crunch. It then proceeded to clack great big claws at Don, and he decided that the wanted nothing more to do with it.

But, when he tried to shake it off, he made the unhappy discovery that it was stronger than he was. It launched itself forward, propelling him backwards. He smashed painfully into a rock wall. The monster then made a popping sound, diminished considerably in size if not in negative disposition, and proceeded to hop back in the direction from whence it had come.

Don sat there, trying to get his breath and hoping for some kind of feeling to return to him. When it did, he immediately wished it would go away, because the feeling was quite painful.

It came to him that this was not a battle he could win, that his brothers weren't here anyway, and so really he had nothing to gain by hanging around. He was not so prideful that a hasty retreat was beneath him. He didn't know where to retreat to, but decided that anywhere must be better than here.

* * *

"You're kidding, right?" Raph sighed, shoulders sinking, "This cave... leads to another cave."

The slug nodded and squeaked with delight.

"I don't suppose that this cave leads to another cave?"

The slug nodded again, indicating that yes, there was another cave after this one.

"Wonderful," Raph groaned, "Exactly how far from the surface are we?"

The slug's eyes went wide and it tilted its head quizzically. Either it didn't understand the question, or else it thought the question brought up an uncertainty about Raph's mental faculties. Either way, it declined to answer, which was perhaps most discouraging of all.

"Great," Raph wiped a hand down his face.

He decided to find a safe, hidden place where he could stop and think things over. He decided the most likely spot was on a high shelf of rock. A few leaps and fancy flips brought him up to the top, far above the ground level of the cavern. A handful of slugs scattered at his arrival, some burrowed into the rock.

Raph ignored them and sat down, setting the slug he had acquired on his left knee.

"You haven't seen any other turtles like me around, have you?" Raph asked the slug.

It stared contemplatively for a moment, then shrugged and shook its head.

"I thought that was too much to hope for," Raph said.

It seemed to him that this was turning into a very bad day. He wondered what else would come along and make it worse. Never one to be accused of too much optimism, Raph was generally of the mind that, if things were bad, they were very likely going to get quite a lot worse.

He sat in silence for awhile, trying to think of what he should do. All he could think was that he wanted very much to hit something, but there really wasn't anything he could reasonably hit without disturbing the slugs which seemed to be quite sentient, peaceful and everywhere.

The ones that had scattered returned after a few minutes, curiosity overcoming caution. A few of the bolder ones even climbed up onto Raph for a closer look. He continued to ignore them, sighing dejectedly and staring off at what he could guess was a far distant cave wall.

The slug on his knee lowered its head and made a sort of sad cooing sound.

"Ah, it's not your fault," Raph said, patting it with one finger, "I only said I wanted to find a way out of the cave I was in, how were you supposed to know what I really meant?"

The slug perked up at this, chirping affectionately.

Nobody had ever told Raph anything about slugs, and so he had no way of knowing that the immediate affection with which this one regarded him was quite unusual. Wild slugs were not generally known for their friendliness, in point of fact one often had to go to a great deal of trouble to catch them. So either this one was very unusual, or else Raph had a way with slugs.

He didn't know anything about this, and it wouldn't have made him feel any better if he had.

* * *

If Raph was feeling dejected, Leo was feeling positively unwanted. Not only was he being shot at by three highly unfriendly people who seemed to have no reason whatsoever to dislike him yet stubbornly persisted in doing so anyway, their wild shooting had dislodged something (Leo wasn't sure what) from the ceiling.

It had then exploded.

Leo wasn't aware of his great luck, since it was only the one slug that had fallen off the ceiling, and it hadn't set off the usual chain reaction that occurred when one fell down and exploded. All he knew was that there was something awfully dangerous overhead, only he wasn't sure what it was.

He never for a moment imagined that it was, in fact, the droves of slugs hanging upside down that were responsible, even though he did see them. It didn't occur to him that they themselves might be explosive. That seemed ridiculously unlikely, a theory only worthy of Mikey.

"You want to watch it?!" Leo yelled out from a boulder he'd managed to find amongst the huts, "You're going to hurt somebody," deciding that this was a little unspecific and probably didn't have any meaning for them, Leo chose to refine his statement thusly, "Like yourselves!"

"Shh!"

Leo flinched and whirled towards the sound of the scolding. A pair of alarmed eyes were peering over the edge of a trashcan, the face shadowed by the lid a trembling hand was holding. Another hand snaked out and pointed upwards. Leo looked up, but didn't see anything aside from the sleeping slugs which, while a little odd looking, didn't seem like any immediate cause for alarm.

"Shh!" the person in the trashcan repeated, then hunkered down and disappeared under the lid.

Leo shrugged, returning his attention to his assailants, who would shortly relocate him and begin shooting again as if their lives depended on it. Leo didn't understand why they were so set on killing him, and he didn't especially care. He just wished they would stop doing what they were doing and leave him alone. That not seeming likely, he decided to go on the offensive again.

The attackers had abandoned their robots, which hadn't made a threatening move since. But their blasters made plenty of threatening moves, and Leo decided that the best idea would be to dismantle them entirely. The only thing was, these guns brought new meaning to the term "live ammunition", and Leo wasn't keen to do anything to whatever the creatures were that...

He looked up again.

The slugs on the ceiling held a new menace. If the ones shot by blasters morphed into bizarre and dangerous monsters, it was only logical that the ones on the ceiling could too.

Leo looked up and tried to count them. There were hundreds, if not thousands, so many that Leo's mind boggled and refused to consider the enormity of the explosion that would follow if all of them happened to be dislodged from their somewhat tenuous perch.

Leo swallowed hard, "Oh dear."

* * *

 _ **Author's Note: Apologies for not posting yesterday, but the site was down (that'll teach me to freeze over Hell by writing something meant to be humor instead of horror) so it really wasn't my fault. If I have time this evening, I'll post an extra chapter.  
**_

 _ **Tip: If just reading the story is too boring for you, you can try to find all of the intentional references to other (also probably better) things. None of you will actually win 1) Because I didn't keep track of them myself so I don't know the number and 2) Because it's entirely possible that I made some unintentional references. Please, feel free to share your tally (preferably along with what you think the reference was from) with the rest of the class, but for goodness sake don't ONLY do that.**_


	3. A Spirited Debate

After Mikey had twice explained how he had come to be where and what he was, it was evident that -not only didn't anyone believe him- they were developing concerns about his mental health as well.

However, there was one good piece of news. The leader seemed to be convinced of one thing, and that was that Mikey hadn't come here to cause them any harm. He holstered his blaster.

"Take it easy, gang," he said, "I think this guy's pretty harmless."

Mikey wasn't sure whether to be relieved or offended by this. Before he could make a fair decision, his new acquaintances were distracted by a call, which the red haired human girl said was "Quiet Lawn Cavern being attacked by the Hooligang and a giant slug of some kind".

"You want to prove you don't mean any harm?" asked the leader (a dark haired boy about the same age as the turtles), and Mikey nodded eagerly, "Then come on and give us a hand. Where's your Mecha Beast?"

Mikey smiled innocently for a few seconds before cracking and saying, "My what?"

"Never mind. You'll ride with me," the leader said, shaking his head, "I'm Eli Shane."

"Michelangelo," Mikey replied.

The other three were a human (the girl), a cave troll (the big blue person) and a molenoid, their names being Trixie, Kord and Pronto respectively. Mikey was moderately disappointed that he didn't get to name the mole, but he didn't say anything. Before he could do anything foolish like that, Mikey spotted the fiery orange and yellow slug on Eli's shoulder, which seemed to be scrutinizing him intently.

"What's _his_ name?" Mikey asked, immediately in love, "He's _so_ cute! Can I touch him?"

"His name's Burpy," Eli replied, "He doesn't always like strangers-"

Eli broke off as Burpy hopped into his hand and leaned forward to get a closer look at Mikey, who very, very gently, touched the top of Burpy's head and then made a "that's so adorable" squeak. Burpy chirped, but then lost interest in Mikey, hopping back onto Eli's shoulder.

"Come on, let's go," Eli said, deciding the introductions were over.

"You sure we can trust this guy?" Kord the cave troll asked Eli quietly, thinking Mikey couldn't hear him, "He did break into our home in the middle of the night."

"Maybe so, but I don't think Mike meant any harm," Eli replied mildly, "Besides, Burpy seems to like him, and he's usually a pretty good judge of character."

"Pronto is also a good judge of character," Pronto interrupted, "And Pronto does not trust the turtle who claims to be from the Burning World."

"Well I don't know what you expect me to do," Eli said in a matter-of-fact tone, "We can't just leave him in the Hideout. If he's not okay, then he could tell a lot of people where we are. We need to keep an eye on him, at least until we know whether he's trustworthy or not."

"I hope you're planning to be careful with your trust, Eli," Kord remarked, "You remember what happened last time."

"I haven't forgotten," Eli told him, "And I'll admit I've never seen anything like him, so I don't think he's really from the surface. But a few tall tales doesn't make him evil," Eli glanced significantly at Pronto, who fairly routinely told exceptionally tall tales.

"I hope you know what you're doing," Trixie said.

"Ah!" Mikey squealed, catching sight of the Mecha Beasts, "Coolest! Robots! Ever!" he ran forward and touched each beast in turn, and then went for the nearest button, "What's this do?"

"Don't touch that!" Eli warned sharply, ignoring the glances of his gang.

Clearly, they were all wondering exactly what sort of person this was who didn't know what a Mecha Beast was, or even to keep his hands off things he didn't understand.

"Ooh, what does this one do? And this one? And this one!"

* * *

If Mikey had found new friends, Don had discovered new enemies. His attempts to escape from the battle between the Kraang and the black-clad henchmen were thwarted repeatedly.

In the end, both he and the few remaining Kraang were forced to surrender (though in the Kraangs' case, it was more like being ripped from their robot bodies and held up by their tentacles). Don quickly realized that he and the Kraang were unfamiliar to the henchmen, who briefly considered simply doing away with these pests, but decided maybe that wasn't such a smart idea.

Don was meanwhile struck by what he found to be a horrifying thought.

While the henchmen argued, Don knelt staring at the arsenal they had, the snarling, writhing little dark colored beasts that transformed into much larger, nastier monsters. He considered that the best thing one could say about them was at least these things had never had mutagen spilled on them, as he imagined that would make them several times worse, assuming that was at all possible.

And it was a perfectly valid concern. A vial of mutagen had been confiscated from the Kraang, and was being suspiciously examined by two henchmen, who took turns holding it at arm's length and listening to it slosh around in its container.

"What _is_ it?" Asked one.

"Some kind of... slug food?" suggested the other.

"I've never seen anything like it. Maybe it's some kind of Dark Water variant?"

"It's not very dark. Or very much like water."

"We better take it back to Dr. Blakk. He'll want to study it."

"What about these?" the one henchman jabbed a finger at the Kraang and Don.

"I guess we take 'em with us," shrugged the other, "Who knows, maybe the pink ones are some kind of slug we've never seen."

"Okay, but what about the green one?"

"Did you see that thing fight? Dr. Blakk will want to study its combat abilities."

Don didn't feel particularly enthusiastic about this Dr. Blakk fellow, or his studies. Something told him that where these henchmen wanted to take him was a place he very much did not want to go.

"Couldn't we just call it a draw?" He suggested hopefully, "You go your way, I go mine, and we promise never to see each other again. How does that sound?"

The response was the time honored mantra of all menial henchmen, "Shut up and get moving."

Don decided that these people could not be reasoned with. He also decided that, for the moment at least, he had no choice but to cooperate with them. Still, he fully intended to escape at the first opportunity. He didn't want to meet the man responsible for these henchmen or their weapons. And he especially had no desire to be studied.

He was a ninja, and ninjas preferred that their secrets stay just that. Secret.

* * *

Leo, meanwhile, had done the majority of his communicating with his katana. It had proven to be easier than expected to evade the shots aimed at him. The fired slugs were incredibly bad at altering their trajectory and so were not unlike the blaster shots Leo was accustomed to avoiding back home.

His opponents were slow of body and wit, and so when he went on the offensive, it wasn't as difficult as anticipated to get past their defenses and then slice their blasters neatly in two. The only real challenge was aiming his strikes so he didn't hurt the slugs, but even that was easy once he got close enough to see where the chamber of each blaster was.

Bolting past his disarmed opponents, Leo also sliced up the big robots they'd ridden in on, just in case those were some kind of weapon too. And then he held his opponents at blade point.

"Surrender now, before I get angry," Leo advised.

"Charge!" this unexpected remark was timely in that it prevented Leo from making a terrible mistake with his next words.

Leo looked up to see four more robotic animals galloping from the other end of the street from whence his defeated opponents had come. Leading the charge was a metal donkey with... well, a mutant on board. This mutant had a rather longer blaster than the ones Leo had just cut to pieces. And he was firing it wildly.

Leo didn't know what it was that flew towards him at a hundred miles an hour (this, Leo didn't know, was no exaggeration of any kind), but he did know that he wanted no part of whatever it was.

He ducked and rolled, and a cloud of dark green stink erupted where he'd been a moment before. A rather annoyed looking slug staggered out of the cloud and glared at him, as though it was deeply offended that he had gotten out of its range. It chirped angrily, shook a squishy, boneless limb at him, and then hopped off towards the mutant on the donkey, who was already lining up another shot.

"Stop!" Leo perked up on hearing Mikey's voice, "Stop it! That's my brother!"

From behind one of the riders, Mikey flipped out and landed squarely in front of the donkey robot and its rider, arms spread.

Leo straightened slightly, but did not relax. He wasn't at all convinced that these new arrivals didn't intend to have his head on a stick just like the ones he'd dispatched. After all, nobody around here seemed to have anything in the way of reason governing their actions. He hadn't done anything to warrant being attacked the first time, yet attacked he had been. He wasn't sure at all that it wouldn't happen again.

"If _he_ is your brother," said the decidedly ugly creature on the donkey, "Then what is he doing helping the Hooligang to destroy this beautiful cavern?!"

"I didn't destroy anything!" Leo shouted back, and was abruptly shushed by a resident, who was peering out from under some piece of machinery he didn't care to identify.

Leo continued in a quieter, but still emphatic tone, " _They_ attacked _me_. _I_ was only _defending_ myself."

"See?" Mikey said, "We're all friends here. This is my brother, Leo. These guys..." Mikey paused thoughtfully, "Well, I don't really remember all their names, but the little orange one is Burpy. Isn't he the cutest thing ever!?" Mikey gestured broadly to the slug perched on the shoulder one of the riders.

"Yes," Leo sighed wearily, "Yes, it's very cute and all, but-... wait, did you say it had a name? The _slugs_ have _names_? I thought they were just live ammunition."

The orange slug leaned forward in response to this remark and, quite unmistakably, growled at him. It was so furious that its little head caught fire. Leo had never seen anyone literally burn with rage before, and he wasn't sure he wanted to again.

"Wait," a bright looking girl on a cat robot maneuvered from the back, "Did you say that you defeated the Hooligang? By yourself?"

"If that's what these guys are called," Leo waved a katana towards his captives, "then yes."

He bit his lip, wondering if that was a bad thing, tensing for another battle.

"Cool," was all the girl said, sounding genuinely impressed.

"Can we go now?" asked the leader of the three Leo had trounced.

"Uh... sure," Leo shrugged, "But... try not to cause anymore trouble, alright?"

"Yeah, whatever."

* * *

Raph was unaware of it, but his arrival had caused considerable consternation to a group of ghoul slugs who'd escaped their masters and made their home in this cavern.

The trouble was that he'd taken up residence on the particular rock ledge that they had been claiming for themselves until he rather rudely showed up and plunked himself down. Angry, but feeling slightly menaced, the pack of ghoul slugs had retreated to the shadows to consider their options.

Not being particularly bright or clear headed, it seemed to them that they really must attack and drive the intruder away, only they weren't too eager about that, seeing as they sensed in him an anger that, while less twisted than theirs, was comparable to the one that possessed them. They equated this fury with danger, and they really weren't thrilled about it.

Being only what they were, they assumed Raph was a resident of Slugterra, and probably in possession of a goodly amount of slugs that they, for reasons they didn't understand, could neither see nor sense in any other manner. And too, they were quite aware of their own limitations.

Without a slinger, they couldn't hit the all important 100 miles an hour to achieve transformation, meaning they were largely limited to just biting. Being only Barreto slugs (the ghouled version of a Polero), they were relatively weak as protoforms. Even at velocity, their uses were somewhat limited: mostly they were good at tripping people and biting them.

Not that the bite of any ghoul slug was to be taken especially lightly. Though their jaws were not terribly strong (slugs weren't really meant to be predators), the long, very sharp fangs of ghouled slugs meant they were very much capable of drawing blood and, taken in numbers, they could be deadly. But this pack wasn't very big (ghouls were antisocial as a rule, and extremely particular about who they shared space with, in that they absolutely refused to associate with any ghoul slugs not of their own kind, which was why most slingers of ghouls had only one kind on their person unless they had a means of keeping the different species separate from one another). While they could put up quite the fight in their present number and form, the most they could hope for was to drive their enemy away.

What they were not concerned about was the only slug they could see, a Fandango. They certainly hated it. It being a product of light and they twisted as they were into one of darkness, it was in their very nature to despise it. It was entirely possible the Fandango knew of their presence and was sticking with Raph for protection rather than companionship. Ghouls were always eager to tear other slugs apart, but especially ones like Fandangos, who gave energy and life to the caverns. However, the Fandango was even less useful in combat than the Barretos, being virtually ineffective for anything in the way of attacking or defending.

Perhaps, thought the Barretos, showing a rare flash of intellect, this slinger had shot all his slugs and was waiting for the Fandango's distinctive energy to draw his slugs back. That would certainly account for why they had seen neither hide nor hair of any tamed slugs the entire time they'd been watching. What that didn't explain was where his blaster was, assuming he had one at all.

That being the case, they ought to attack immediately. But if it wasn't the case, they might ought to do something else entirely. Only they weren't sure what and, having no clear leader and certainly having no interest in democracy of any sort, they weren't in agreement about what, exactly, should be done.

While they argued amongst themselves, the other slugs that had been inhabiting the ledge gravitated towards Raph (or perhaps the Fandango), and chattered urgently to one another. They knew the ghouls were there, and they didn't like it, but they didn't have any way of dealing with it except running away and, when one is on a ledge, even that option is fairly limited.

Raph noticed the shift from curiosity to nervousness and, not being entirely slow of mind, realized fairly quickly that it had naught to do with him. If the slugs had been worried about him, they would have slipped away from him, they would not be drawn in closer. They were afraid of something, and seemed to think -if he wasn't actually a protector- Raph was at the very least the lesser of two evils.

Raph tried to think of something besides turtles that ate slugs. But scientific awareness of any sort had never stuck to him, and so he couldn't think why slugs would voluntarily come towards him, unless there was something so heinously evil lurking in the shadows that it defied imagination, and soundly trounced logic as well. As nonchalantly as possible, Raph prepared to fight for his life.


	4. From Under the Surface of the Surface

Eli had more than once been accused of being too trusting. There were times lately that he had actually believed it. Even so he recognized in Leo, the blue masked mutant ninja turtle, a kindred spirit.

Both of them were leaders, and both of them were -from time to time- a little too optimistic for their own good, especially where the character of other people was concerned. They also both struggled with the members of their team who, while valued, sometimes seemed like more trouble than they were worth.

That is, assuming that neither Leo nor Mikey were lying to him.

Leo had the sort of earnest way of looking at you that just made you believe almost anything he said. He spoke as though every word was, as a matter of honor, the complete truth. Eli didn't realize it, but that too made him and Leo really very much alike. This pure look of total honest was part of what slugs liked so much about Eli.

The only thing Eli was having a great deal of trouble coming to terms with was the turtles' insistence that they were from the surface world. Unlike the rest of his gang, Eli came from what in Slugterra was known as the "Burning World", which was largely thought to be a myth by the majority of Slugterrans.

Having grown up in the world above, Eli was fairly certain that he would have at least heard about it if there were four-foot-tall talking turtles capering about. Especially when he was told where they came from.

"New York? Really?" Eli was skeptical.

"Yes," Leo nodded, his blue eyes looking their most trustworthy, "Me and my brothers grew up there with our Sensei (he's a rat you know). And that's where we were just before whatever happened... happened."

"I'm sorry," Eli shook his head, "I'm having trouble believing you came from the same world I did."

"You have a cave troll and a talking mole in your gang, but a mutant turtle is too much for you?" Leo crossed his arms, "You have live ammunition that transform into... whatever it is they turn into. They even talk... in their own way. You _name_ your bullets. But ninjas in New York is where you draw the line."

"That's different," Eli protested, "This is Slugterra, not the surface world. Slugs and Molenoids and all that, that's normal here. Not on the surface."

"Surface sounds boring," Trixie remarked, but they ignored her.

Trixie had only recently learned that the Burning World was real, and at first had peppered Eli with questions about it, only to realize that the Burning World really didn't sound all that special. But she thought perhaps that was only Eli's perception of it, and maybe there was some cool stuff he left out. In any case, he didn't seem very eager to go back.

"I think I'd have heard if there were turtles like you in New York," Eli said.

"Nuh-uh!" Mikey interjected, "We were hiding. Ninjas are very stealthy. Like dinosaurs," he nodded knowledgeably.

"Mikey's right... well, about two things at least. I don't know about any dinosaurs," Leo admitted, "We ourselves didn't go to the surface until recently."

"What, you live in the sewers like that urban legend about the crocodiles?"

"It's not an urban legend!" Mikey protested, "There _is_ a crocodile in the sewer. His name is Leatherhead... Uh, Leo... what's an urban legend?"

"It's something people don't believe in, but tell stories about anyway," Leo said

"Like income taxes!" Mikey exclaimed.

Leo, not sparing Mikey a glance or remark, addressed Eli, "Look, Eli, I don't really care if you believe us or not. I appreciate you not shooting Mikey... or me, for that matter. But if Mikey and I are both here, then so are Raph and Donnie. And we've got to find them."

"Well, we've got nothing better to do," Eli said, glancing at his gang, "so we'll tag along."

"Besides," Pronto put in, "No one knows the 99 caverns better than Pronto! You will _never_ find your way without his valuable assistance!"

"Ninety... nine," Leo sighed, deflating visibly, "Great. And here I thought it would be easy."

"While we're here," Trixie said, "We should visit Red Hook."

"What for?" Eli asked, as Mikey wondered aloud, "What's Red Hook?"

"Red Hook is a slingersmith," Trixie explained, then answered Eli, "If these guys are gonna get into any more fights, they'll need blasters."

"But they don't have any slugs," Eli pointed out, "And, if there is a fight, we'll need ours."

"We have weapons," Leo said, unsheathing a katana while Mikey pulled out a nun-chuck.

"That's very nice," Trixie said, not really sure what those objects were, "But the only sure way to survive down here is by dueling. For that, you need a blaster. And slugs."

"So how do we get slugs?" Leo asked, deciding that trying to explain Ninjutsu would be a waste of time.

"Usually by catching wild ones," Trixie said, "But that takes practice."

"If you have gold, you can buy them," Kord said.

"Does it look like we have money to you?" Leo asked, raising what would have been an eyebrow if he'd had one, which he didn't (like all turtles, Leo was completely hairless).

Mikey had lost interest in the conversation almost immediately and wandered off. Seeing a slug perching on a rock ledge overhead, he proceeded to try and leap for it, but both the slug and the ledge upon which it sat were just out of reach. Mikey hopped up and down several times, but the slug was unattainable. Finally, with more frustration than care, Mikey pulled out his kusarigama, swung it, and knocked the slug off its perch. With a startled squeal, the slug fell off the ledge and into Mikey's hands.

This happened just as Leo asked whether or not it looked like he had any money, so nobody actually bothered to answer him and, indeed, the whole conversation became moot at that point.

"What kind of slug did you get?" Eli asked, before remembering the turtles had no clue what one kind of slug versus another looked like, "Open your hands."

Slowly, careful not to let the slug get away, Mikey opened his hands.

"A Hop Rock," Kord pronounced.

"Is that good?" Mikey asked of Leo, who merely shrugged.

"They're pretty common," Trixie said, but Eli added, "They're a great slug for a beginner."

"I'm gonna call him Skip," Mikey said, "You know, like how you skip rocks, and since he's a Hop Rock-"

"We get it," Leo interrupted testily.

"Oh good," Pronto muttered irritably, "Another who insists on naming all his slugs."

"Wait," Leo said, "Is that unusual? Now I'm really confused."

* * *

Raph didn't really see what flew at him, as it came from behind. Swinging around to face it, he raised a sai to defend against the unidentified something. He'd trained with and against a variety of weapons, but nothing, _nothing_ had fully prepared him for what hit his sai and then clamped its ugly teeth into the steel.

Raph shook the sai with the ghoulish beast attached to it, but the ghoul slug refused to let go. Raph thought it sort of resembled a cockroach, and then immediately regretted the comparison. Raph had few fears in life and, with the exception of one very specific fear, all of them were perfectly reasonable.

Somehow, in spite of the fact that he'd spent his entire life in a sewer full of them, Raph had never managed to shake his inborn terror of cockroaches. And something about this thing's teeth reminded him of roach mandibles, and that made it even more repulsive than it already was.

There was a feeling of terrible wrongness about it, which Raph sensed but couldn't fully understand. Instinct told him that mutagen had nothing to do with this creature's creation, but it still wasn't right. And it wasn't just that he didn't like it. Its horrible eyes glared at him with the kind of madness no creature short of a rabid one is capable of approximating. It wasn't a thing that should exist.

"Get! Off!" Raph swung his sai hard, and the ghoul slug lost its grip.

It slipped off the sai and went spinning away through the air, flying as well as a bean bag of similar size off the ledge and away to points undetermined, several of which it would bounce off of in the manner of a pinball before eventually landing -with a rather audible splat- on the ground at a far enough distance as to make the record holder for longest throw of a baseball wince with shame.

Raph didn't get a chance to appreciate all these analogies because, no sooner had he rid himself of one ghoul slug, then he was accosted by two more.

One had approached while he was distracted and now proceeded to insert its fangs into his right calf with fiendish glee. The other lunged for the throat just as the first had done, and was blocked in a similar manner, only this time Raph had an idea of what was after him and so punched it in the face rather than allow it to chew on his sai. The creature dropped back with a squishy sound.

Raph didn't appreciate this victory either, because he became rather suddenly aware of a sharp pain in his leg. With a yelp, he looked down and spotted the slug that had latched onto him like a large tick. As he bent down to pry it off, still another one heaved itself out of the shadows and bit his arm.

The one that had squished on the ground was righting itself for another attack when it spotted Raph's Fandango crouching nervously behind him. Abandoning any sense of proportion (in other words, totally forgetting that Raph was really quite dangerous where the Fandango was not only harmless, but practically helpless as well), it lunged ferociously for the Fandango, who squealed pitifully.

Raph had many faults, but they were largely outshone by his fiercely protective nature, which was normally reserved for his brothers, but also extended to friends and pets as well. The Fandango was something like those last two (though it hadn't been determined yet which of the two), and Raph's infamous fury was ignited.

It was one thing for these monsters to attack him, the little slug was another thing entirely. At least Raph could defend himself. The slug he'd befriended seemed capable only of screaming and trying to hide behind Raph's feet.

Raph forgot the slugs clinging to him and plunked the tip of his sai down between the ghoul and his slug. The ghoul growled at him. Raph, in the long standing tradition of one whose fury surpasses all socially accepted norms, growled right back, only instead of having madness to aid his ferocity, his rage was fueled by the same instinct that makes mother bears so very dangerous when you molest their cubs.

The ghoul pressed its luck by lunging at Raph, who blocked it and then pinned it to the ground with a sai. The Fandango, in the meantime, hopped up onto Raph, and discovered that it could slide into his shell.

With a startled yip, Raph shivered at the unexpected thing sliding around in his shell. The ghouls pressed their advantage and leaped on him together. Raph lost his balance and -being right at the edge of a ledge- had no time to find it again before toppling over the side.

Having no other means of protecting himself, Raph did something he very seldom chose to do. He pulled all four limbs and his head into his shell. It was a cramped fit, and his plastron was considerably softer than that of a non-mutant turtle. Still, it was all he had.

He spun and banged his way down, flipping over a few times and even tumbling down on edge for several feet before spinning onto his carapace and sliding across the cave floor.

When the spinning finally stopped, Raph utterly failed to move.

* * *

Don had been put in a cell in one of the rooms where ordinary slugs were ghouled. Don hadn't seen normal slugs until now, and the ones he saw were obviously terrified. Seeing them gassed and turned into ghouls fascinated the scientist in Don, but also disgusted him.

However, he was somewhat less than deeply horrified. From his perspective, this ghouling of slugs process was not unlike a mutagen spill. Admittedly, the mutagen had done something not wholly awful to Don and his brothers but, far and away, it tended to turn people and animals into misshapen monsters whose blind rage overrode any sense they might have had remaining after the process was complete. Only a handful of mutants fared so well as Splinter and the turtles.

It looked to Don like the substance that turned the slugs into ghouls was an awful lot like mutagen, only it was red and generally administered in a gas form instead of liquid. Still, it wasn't difficult to tell that this process was thoroughly vile and probably should be stopped.

But he had a greater concern, which was realized when a newly minted ghoul smashed out of its shell container and went on a shrieking rampage across tables and counters. Several henchmen tried to catch it, but it hopped away from them, chortling evilly to itself.

And then it paused, and stared.

With a coo of unmistakable attraction, it began to slither in the direction of the vial of mutagen that had been left unattended on a counter across the room.

The Kraang squealed protests -or epithets- that no one heard or understood. Don put their declarations into words that could be understood.

"Keep it away from the mutagen!" He yelled, but nobody listened to him either.

The ghoul reached the vial, peered quizzically at it, and then sank its fangs deep into the container. A dull cracking was followed by the chilling sound of mutagen oozing over a ghoul body.

Shrieking, snarling, flailing, the ghoul expanded and flung spittle everywhere as its mutating limbs lengthened, strengthened, and gained claws which were clearly meant for evisceration.

"Oh no," Don said, backing to the rear of his cell, trying not to be noticed by the enormous, roving, demonic red eyes of the mutating ghoul, "That's bad."

* * *

 ** _A/N: For those of you who don't know the plastron is the underside of a turtle's shell, or the front of a mutant turtle's shell. The back is called the carapace._**


	5. Escape and Escape

Raph only slowly managed to uncurl himself from the ball he'd rolled into. He now was fairly certain he had at least a basic understanding of what it felt like to be a pinball. He felt bruised, battered, dizzy and ever so slightly like he'd been hit with paddles just as he was about to make his escape.

But the worst feeling was the sharp stinging of the bites he'd suffered from the ghouls' many teeth. The worst bite was in his calf, the razor fangs had gone straight into the muscle and felt like they'd torn something. Worse yet, there was now blood on the inside of Raph's shell.

Being a teenager, and one who lived in a sewer at that, Raph's notions of hygiene left a lot to be desired. But no turtle -teenage, mutant, ninja, or otherwise- will happily abide a soiled interior shell.

Raph had a greater concern though, and that was the slug which had crawled into his shell just before he fell. For a horrific few seconds, he was appalled to think that it had become a smear on the inside of his shell. He wasn't sure which was worse, the slug being a smear, or said smear being on the inside where Raph could feel it, but not see it or do anything about it.

But relief came when a cautious chirp was followed by the slug's emerging from behind Raph's back. It was totally unharmed, and had actually enjoyed the experience (virtually all slugs love going very fast, most especially if it includes rapidly going up, down and around like an out-of-control roller coaster). It hopped into Raph's open hand and chittered delightedly at him.

"What were those things?" Raph wondered aloud and, though it was fully impossible for it to adequately do so, the slug immediately proceeded to try and explain ghouls to him.

"Well," Raph interrupted after absorbing the futility of trying to understand the slug, "At least we lost them," he tried to stand up, but his right leg went out from under him without asking for permission to do so beforehand.

Raph growled at the offending appendage, tried again, and met the same result, only more painfully.

He closed his eyes briefly, taking steady, measured breaths, trying to regain some semblance of internal balance. Losing his mind wouldn't do him any good. He needed to think about what had to happen next. Well, first he needed to get out of the open. And put some distance between himself and the fanged monsters up on the ledge, assuming they were coming after him.

This time when he stood up, Raph put the majority of his weight on his uninjured leg, and managed to actually remain standing. He looked off towards the spot where he'd flung the first ghoul (and he had already begun thinking of them as ghouls- it was really the only term that suited them).

In the distance, he saw what looked like two separate openings in the cave wall, tunnels no doubt. Though quite certain they only led to other caves, Raph decided he wanted to go one of the two directions, since this cavern was clearly infested with some sort of evil he didn't feel like fighting right now (and that was a painful admission, even if he only made it to himself).

"So, what do you think?" Raph asked of the slug, "Left or right?"

The slug looked thoughtful, then gestured toward the left tunnel, which was less of an uphill climb than the right hand tunnel. It also looked a lot darker and more forbidding, but Raph decided to trust his guide's intuition without further questions. He set the slug on his shoulder and started limping that way.

* * *

"It takes awhile to bond with a slug," Trixie had warned, after the concept of dueling was adequately explained to Leo who, in turn, explained it in simpler terms to Mikey.

"And learning to fire one is no joke either," Kord admonished.

"Hammer, trigger, barrel, chamber, looks like a regular gun to me," Leo had returned mildly.

They traveled to a cavern where duels were going on, and Trixie had lent Mikey her weapon. A questionably charitable soul, on seeing Mikey possessed only one slug, had given him a pair of Floppers, which he fell in love with immediately, dubbing them Nibbler and Crumbs.

He would hear nothing against them, though Trixie tried (with what she determined to be truly heroic amounts of patience) to explain that they would not transform and, indeed, had no abilities which could be termed special unless one counted the fact that they didn't transform as "special".

"Mikey has a way with lower lifeforms," Leo said in response to Trixie's warning about slug bonding.

"The day I see a slinger bond with a slug as fast as Eli is the day I eat my hat," Kord replied.

"You sure you want to make that bet?" Leo inquired.

Under any other circumstances, Leo would have had less faith in Mikey's abilities. Though he didn't make as much a habit of mentioning it as Raph did, Leo was well aware that, when it came to brains, Mikey was more turtle than human. Or more human than turtle. Whichever the case, he'd gotten the short end of the stick when it came to intellect.

But when it came to the absurd (and, in Leo's mind, slugslinging certainly qualified), Mikey was a master. Mikey had more or less instantaneously grasped what had taken Leo at least several minutes, and that was that the slugs morphed into larger, more dangerous slugs when fired from a suitably designed blaster. He had also managed to catch one with no prior instruction as to how to do so.

What was more, Mikey was ninja. His assigned opponent clearly wasn't.

"Just be careful," Trixie advised Mikey, "Your opponent doesn't look too skilled, but looks _can_ be deceiving," silently she hoped that Mikey's own looks were deceiving, because he appeared to have the operational mentality of a peanut (in other words, he appeared to be almost inconceivably stupid).

"Don't waste time," was Leo's stern admonishment, "The sooner we get some slugs, the sooner we can get down to finding Donnie and Raph."

The plan, such as it was, was for Mikey to win a few duels, and then for Leo to join him in dueling until they had amassed enough wealth to purchase their own blasters and preferably at least one Mecha Beast of some description. Eli had warned them that they might not be able to accomplish all that at once, and they would have travel in search of turtles and also caverns where duels were being held.

Leo seemed to have confidence that the turtles would win every match; confidence the Shane Gang did not share. Then again, they had never seen the turtles in action, otherwise they might have shared Leo's confidence that even Mikey was more than a match for the opponent he now faced.

"Stand back and be awestruck!" Mikey said, "This is gonna be epic!"

The fight went exactly as Leo had anticipated, and not at all as the Shane Gang expected. Mikey allowed his opponent the first shot, leaping and flipping to dodge it as it was fired. At the same time, still in the air, Mikey loaded his Hop Rock into the chamber and -with accuracy that would stun anyone who didn't know that pinpoint accuracy had been something Splinter had drilled into the heads of all (even this most stubbornly empty headed) of his students- fired.

By the time he landed on his feet with a flourish, Mikey found his opponent had surrendered. He bowed slightly, more as a matter of show than anything else, and picked a slug from his opponent's arsenal. He tossed this slug to Leo, who then borrowed Pronto's dubiously useful blaster.

"What is it?" Leo asked Eli, holding up the easily won slug.

"Tazerling," Eli replied, "Nice."

"I picked it 'cause it's blue," Mikey said, adding conspiratorially, "Leo likes blue."

"I thought maybe you remembered what Joules did to you," Eli said.

Mikey shook his head, "No way! That's the same kind of slug? Wow! Uh... Leo, you want to trade?"

"Nah," Leo replied, "I'm good... but, uh... what does a Tazerling do?"

Eli explained the electric properties of the Tazerling, and warned against firing it too often in too short a span of time, under penalty of potential backfire, wherein the shock intended for your opponent went to you instead. It could also potentially disable your blaster.

"Duly noted," Leo said, then looked at the slug, "Well, how do you feel about dueling alongside somebody with actual skill?"

The Tazerling squeaked and ran an electric charge between its two antennae, showing its eagerness.

"Well, since you're my first slug, I think I'll call you... Captain Ryan. Cappy, for short."

"Seriously?" Mikey shook his head with disapproval, "You can't just name your slugs after your favorite TV show characters. You gotta be more creative."

"Says the turtle who named his slug Skip," Leo said, and his Tazerling nodded its agreement.

Cappy was a fairly experienced dueling slug, and had been sorely disappointed with his latest master, who had won him by sheer lucky accident. Having seen Mikey perform, Cappy was eager to be fired by someone who closely resembled him. Cappy was a respectably skilled slug, and was hopeful that his new slinger was worthy of his talents.

"I'm counting on you," Leo told Cappy, "I need to win a lot of duels, and fast. I hope you're up for it."

Cappy gave him a bit of a jolt via electric shock and scowled. He was clearly incensed that Leo would question how capable he was.

"Some slugs have more attitude than others," Eli told the slightly electrocuted Leo.

"Uh-huh," Leo nodded vaguely.

"If you're half as good as your brother," Trixie said, putting a reassuring hand on Leo's shoulder, "You'll be okay."

Leo smiled slightly, "When it comes to combat," he said, "I'm twice the turtle Mikey is."

Whether this was truth or sheer boasting was unclear, but Trixie didn't question it.

"Pronto would now like to see Kord, as promised, eat his hat," Pronto said.

Eli laughed and said, "You gotta stop making bets like that."

"Aw nuts," Kord muttered, removing his hat.

* * *

The mutated ghoul slug resembled, to the henchmen, nothing so much as the most hideous combination of a ghoul slug after reaching velocity, a slughound, a member of the Shadow Clan and an Ice Ogre.

To Don, it looked like nothing so much as a heinous crime against nature, all claws and tentacles and spiked prehensile tail, glowing red eyes and an unsettling cloud of smoke about the tum that made it utterly impossible to accurately judge the creature's size.

The Demon Ghoul (Don couldn't believe he'd already named it; that was more the sort of thing Mikey did), turned round to face some henchmen which were shooting at it. And then it did something that seemed worse than anything else: it breathed fire on them.

Then it continued to about face, swinging around towards the containers of slugs. Its tail swung and thwacked against the glass wall of the cell housing Don and the Kraang. The glass cracked, then shattered. The Kraang shrieked in horror, distracting the Demon Ghoul from whatever it was doing.

It turned towards them, roared and Don had a sudden, sickening insight that he could neither understand nor entirely come to terms with: the Demon Ghoul was hungry.

Setting its sights on the Kraang, the beast lumbered forward. Don slid sideways out of his cell. That brought him closer to the slug containers than the exit, but anything to be out of the Demon Ghoul's direct line of sight was fine by him. As he got closer to the containers, Don saw the frightened faces of the slugs, and heard their frantic chirping. He stood thinking a moment.

His thought process was interrupted by the casual swinging of the Demon Ghoul's enormous tail. It struck at him, and Don was only saved from a vicious spike to the chest by his Bo. The Demon Ghoul swiped away the Bo with its tail. Don looked towards its head in alarm, thinking it was going to turn on him next. But it was making a disgusting slurping noise as it crunched its way through a Kraang, another pinned in its hideous right claw. Don decided that getting out was highly advisable.

He didn't waste time trying to reclaim his bo staff. Instead, he snatched up a container of slugs and made a mad dash around the room, ducking behind boxes and bins and tables and chairs and really anything that would keep the Demon Ghoul from noticing him. All to no avail.

Finishing off the Kraang, the Demon Ghoul turned to see Don near the exit. With an ear splitting roar, it swiped up a ghoul in a shell with its tail and flung it. The thing reached velocity and exploded into the wall directly in front of Don. Don yelped and fell back, then scrambled to his feet and kept going.

He rolled out the door just as the Demon Ghoul leaped for him. The curved claws of one paw caught Don by the left shoulder and raked down it, eliciting a cry that was as much a product of terror as pain, but Don managed to tear free and keep going.

Fortunately for him, more henchmen arrived to try and subdue the Demon Ghoul, and he was able to make his escape from the building and away into a darker, less occupied, part of the cavern.

Collapsing to the ground, Don gasped in pain and wondered if the container he'd grabbed was really worth it. He knew that, somehow, these slugs could become weapons with which he could defend himself. But he didn't know how, and had no materials to work with.

It also had finally struck home -or rather, extremely far from home- that he was very lost, very alone, and very much ill prepared for whatever this place (wherever and whatever it was) had to offer.

One thing he didn't know was that he had just secured a healthy number and variety of slugs and, considering how he had come to have them, they were immensely devoted to him already. They were grateful that he'd saved them from being ghouled, and also from being eaten.

Even if he were to leave the container here and stagger on alone, the slugs would follow him to prove their gratitude. All the way to the ends of Slugterra should it prove absolutely necessary. Slugs are among the most loyal of all creatures, and these were no exception.


	6. At the End of the Day

"I wouldn't have believed it if I hadn't seen it," Trixie declared that evening as they set up camp.

"Indeed," Pronto interjected, "It is a feat never before achieved. Except by Pronto the Magnificent."

Leo and Mikey had set the record for Most Matches Won in a Row in a Single Day for the cavern. For this achievement, they were gifted a blaster. Admittedly not a very nice one, but good enough. Mikey had then spent all of his won slugs (except for Skip the Hop Rock and the two Floppers, Nibbler and Crumbs) to purchase the cheapest Mecha Beast available (these were expensive, and a single day's worth of won slugs wasn't the same in this cavern as gold).

Kord had told the turtles that they should save their slugs as much as possible. To aid them in this, he promised to tune up and otherwise improve the blaster and Mecha Beast, so that they were at least average, if not above that (Kord said he would do his best in the morning).

Leo, having saved his slugs, got to keep the blaster, while the Mecha Beast became Mikey's property. Leo regretted this almost as soon as he'd agreed to it, as it occurred to him that Mikey was, perhaps, not the ideal driver for... any vehicle, let alone a Mecha Beast, which was pretty imposing to look at.

Actually, it looked like a shambles to Leo (who thought maybe letting Mikey select his ride had also been an error in judgment). Kord assured him that it was a horse, and would resemble one in no time. Leo had little faith in that promise, but said nothing.

On the other hand, it was only practical for Leo to have the blaster. He had proven to be the better strategist, if not the better shot, and Mikey had a range weapon of his own besides. Leo of course had shurikens, but not an infinite number of them. Aside from even that, Leo was the one with the slugs.

Trixie had explained in brief how to care for the slugs, and before they left the cavern where they'd dueled, Leo gave one of his slugs in trade for food for them, which he shared with Mikey. Mikey immediately tasted one of the slug food pellets.

"Mmm," Mikey commented appreciatively, "Reminds me of algae cake."

Leo winced. Ever since discovering pizza, he and his brothers had done their level best to forget they had ever lived on algae and worms. Except, apparently, Mikey.

Eli, meanwhile, had built a fire and Burpy had lit it for him.

It seemed odd to Leo that an underground place could have a clearly defined day and night, but these caverns certainly seemed to. It had gotten dark and would soon be quite chilly. Leo, cold-blooded reptile that he was, appreciated the warmth of the fire more than he dared let on.

Though he tried not to, Leo found himself wondering how his other two brothers were faring. He was worried about them. Raph was better at making enemies than friends, and Don was mostly socially awkward. Aside from which, they would be doing everything possible to remain unseen (which Leo would have been doing, had he not been planted right in the middle of a fight).

Leo pictured them alone, cold, hungry and in the dark.

 _I will find you. Just hang on, wherever you are._

* * *

Don had found a shelf of rock that was sheltered from view of the building he'd escaped. He was above the ground, and well back in the shadows, out of view of anyone who might come looking for him. This accomplished, he'd fallen into a daze, brought on by shock and blood loss.

As night descended, he began to shiver, which really wasn't all that useful for a turtle. This reflexive action came from his human side, but really didn't help at all where cold-blooded creatures were concerned. He also had a hollow feeling. He was hungry and cold and exhausted. As with all reptiles when they get cold enough, Don simply lay still, unable to move or think.

But his slugs were not so inert.

Seeing their beloved rescuer suffering and possibly dying, they began to work their way out of their individual capsules and then the main container. It took them the better part of three hours, but they eventually got free and, one by one, tried their hand at doing something helpful.

A Flaringo set off a tiny spark. But it couldn't make a fire on its own, especially without materials. Chattering away to itself, it hopped away into the darkness, followed by a couple of other slugs.

An Aquabeek tried spitting some water at the unmoving turtle, but got no reaction. It shrugged at the Arachnet next to it, who suddenly had what it thought to be a brilliant idea and took off after the Flaringo. It managed to catch up with the Flaringo and chirped out its thoughts.

The Flaringo was delighted and happily returned to where Don still lay.

The Arachnet spat some webbing, and the Flaringo lit it. Thrilled by success, the Arachnet spat some more webbing. A second Arachnet joined it, and the two of them got the fire really going. The slugs who'd hopped away returned with bits of twigs and dry leaves and whatever they could find that would burn that was small enough for them to carry.

Somehow, the slugs knew that Don needed most to be warm. They worked hard to achieve this, scurrying back and forth with kindling and even working as teams to carry larger items. They were desperately unorganized, having no clear leader, but they did have a singular goal.

Once the little shelf was reasonably warm, the Aquabeek spat at Don again. This time, he shifted a little and moaned. The slugs looked at one another fearfully. Their new master seemed very sick and they had no idea what to do about it. Clever beyond what their appearances suggested, they were still only slugs, and their resources were limited.

The Flaringo opened his mouth and pointed at it, the universal gesture for "hungry". The others considered this. They thought very hard about it. Then the Aquabeek nodded decisively. It seemed to him as though the Flaringo might be right.

Slugs had few and simple needs. To be warm enough (enough being dependent upon the type of slug), to reach velocity often enough to keep in shape, to get enough rest, and to get fed regularly. A human liked to eat three times a day, a slug _needed_ to. In the wild, they spent all day, every day foraging. In captivity, they tended to get three solid meals a day, which was enough (though they were always up for a snack).

The Aquabeek chattered, wondering what a turtle ate. The two Arachnets chirped a few suggestions, then slapped each other because of a disagreement. Angrily, they spat webbing and stuck each other to the walls. The Flaringo burned the webbing and they fell on their faces. He jabbered at them in fury.

If they weren't going to take this seriously, then why bother trying to help at all?

A Rammstone ended the debate, by suggesting that maybe they should get foods they liked. Surely their new master would eat one of those things.

The others thought this seemed a very clever notion and anyway, they were rather hungry themselves. After considerable arguing, they decided which slugs would stay to make sure the fire stayed strong and which ones would go foraging. They were wary, of course.

They didn't want too big a fire, that would be noticed by the wrong sorts of people. They were uncomfortably close to a building where ghouling took place, and they'd all been caught once. Actually, some of them had been sold, not caught in the wild. But it amounted to the same thing.

Don, for his part, wandered in and out of a vague sort of awareness. Now and then, he managed to convince one eye to open, but it never liked what it saw and so closed itself. His vision, when he had it at all, swam about like a frog in a pond, and he really wasn't sure what it was he was seeing, only that it seemed to be gibbering senselessly and was also on fire. His mind didn't like that input and refused to take in anything else. He blacked out.

* * *

Raph had no such concerns with the cold.

He had stumbled into a cave that featured blackened rock cliffs and ran with rivers of lava. It was really quite warm, and darkness was not abundant. Though he was hungry, for Raph that was not yet a major concern. One day without food wouldn't kill him. Heck, it wouldn't even slow him down.

Once again, Raph's slug attracted some of the natives, one of whom was more than just curious, but also really quite adventurous. It was a dark, muddy brown and had large golden eyes. It was warm to the touch, which was something Raph had no need of right now, but he didn't begrudge its company.

Especially endearing was the way the two slugs interacted and got to know one another. In a way, it made Raph homesick. He'd spent hours just watching his pet turtle, Spike, eat leaves. Watching Spike poke about in his slow way was just about the only thing that actually had a calming effect on Raph.

Thinking of Spike made him decide that, if he was going to have slugs, he'd better name them. Especially since he now appeared to have two of them. He couldn't very well just say "Hey You" and expect them to know which one of them was "Hey" and which one was "You".

Being none too swift in the thought department, Raph decided that he would have to sleep on it. Besides, maybe both slugs would lose interest and be gone in the morning. If they were going to abandon him, he decided that they'd best do it before he named them.

He again found a high perch, this time making sure it was vacant. And then he settled down to sleep. The Lavalynx (for that's what it was) and the Fandango nestled against his neck and shoulder, and exhibited no inclination whatsoever to leave. The Fandango soon began to snore.

* * *

"Eli, I know we're all about doing good and all," Kord said quietly after the others had gone to sleep, "But what are we doin' with these guys?"

Eli didn't answer for a long moment, looking across the campfire at Leo and Mikey, who were sleeping in an uncomfortable looking and totally dignity excluding heap. He'd never seen anything like them, either here or on the surface. Yet, strangely, they reminded him of what he no longer had. Family.

He shook his head. He _did_ have family. So they weren't related to him, so what? The Shane Gang was his family now. And anyway, the memories of his "real" family were limited by necessity. His father had been the guardian of Slugterra. Sometimes he was gone for long periods. Sometimes he could only stop by for a minute. Eli and his dad were close, but also... not so close.

"We don't have any pressing business right now," Eli said slowly, "and... I dunno. I just feel like it's important they go back wherever they came from. They're like us, Kord."

"I don't follow."

"They're protectors," Eli explained, "You can almost see it on them. And... if it's not possible to get them home, at the very least... well... you've seen them fight. I'd prefer they were on our side."

"No argument here," Kord admitted, "Did you see them in the duels today? I ain't never seen moves like that. And I been duelin' a long time. And here I thought you were the last amazing thing to come to Slugterra."

Another silence passed between them. There were times, a lot of times actually, when Eli felt that more was said when no words were spoken than when many were. In this case, at least, he was right. After some consideration, and several sidelong looks at Eli, Kord thought of something.

"You're worried about the Kraang, aren't ya?" Kord guessed.

"If Leo and all his brothers were transported here, doesn't it make sense that the aliens they were fighting came too?" Mikey had explained the Kraang, and then Leo had made what Mikey said make some amount of sense.

"And that mutagen stuff too," Kord said with a shudder, "Imagine if Dr. Blakk got his hands on that."

"I'm trying not to," Eli replied, trying to mask his own shudder by moving closer to the fire.

The bright flame reflected in his eyes, lighting the worry that lurked in their depths. Kord didn't like it when he saw that look. Eli didn't worry about much, but what he did worry about was usually worth consideration. There was something Eli was thinking of that he wasn't saying out loud. Something which would probably keep him up half the night.

And, when Eli didn't sleep, nobody slept. It wasn't so much that Eli paced around or anything like that. He just sat up, staring into space. Maybe he was thinking too loud. Whatever the case, Kord didn't expect that anybody would be getting a lot of sleep tonight. Except maybe the turtles.

What he didn't know was that, while Mikey was snoring away, Leo was not sleeping. He half opened one eye, gazing through the fire at Eli and Kord, his mind racing. Overhearing the conversation had caused him to be struck by a horrible thought.

* * *

That horrible thought was, at present, crashing around freely several caverns away. In its body it had six holding sacks for slugs or -to be entirely accurate- ghouls; three sacks behind each shoulder. It had a collection of ghouls, and had eaten a goodly number of slugs, as well as toasting any people it came across. Now it was lumbering around in the darkness, seeking.

Its gleaming red eyes glowed in the dark, its rank breath heaved in and out of its chest noisily. Its lashing tail cut plants and rocks behind it to tiny pieces as it alternately walked and slithered, leaving black slime in its wake.

Suddenly, it raised its head and stuck out a hideous, slimy blue tongue as though scenting the air.

The Demon Ghoul had left its cavern of origin behind. It was hot on the trail of other ghouls.

Alone, it was powerful. With a pack, it would be unstoppable.


	7. Onward and Inward

Raph was moderately surprised to find that neither of the slugs had abandoned him in the night and they actually seemed to be quite set on the notion of becoming his traveling companions. It was obvious that he couldn't put it off any longer; he would have to give them names.

He called the first one Friender (because of its seeming knack for making friends with nearly every slug it met), and the second one Diego (because why not?).

That concluded the first order of business for the morning. The second order of business was somewhat less clear, and would likely be less successful.

Being quicker of temper than wit, Raph had failed utterly to consider how very many caverns he might be facing, much less the distances that surely must arise between them. What he had considered was that his brothers might be here somewhere and, even if they were not, that there must surely be a way out. He had, after all, gotten in somehow hadn't he? In any case, a journey was called for.

He had, of course, heard of the notion of staying where you were if you were lost. But he had not admitted to being lost, only to not knowing where he was (which, he felt, was a different kettle of fish entirely. Not that he was hungry or anything, but a kettle of fish sounded pretty good, even though he wasn't altogether certain what one of those really was).

In any case, he'd already failed completely where staying was concerned, and here was no place to stay. Aside from being slightly full of lava for his taste, Raph felt sure that there really wasn't any food to be found in this place (except maybe the slugs, which he was by this point thoroughly opposed to eating). And there was obviously even less water than food, and he was desperately thirsty as well as hungry.

"I wonder what you guys eat," Raph said to the slugs, after telling them their names.

The slugs looked around. Then Diego the Lavalynx hopped off and returned a few minutes later with a rather blackened, odd looking berry from a plant Raph certainly couldn't see from where he was. Friender the Fandango looked moderately appalled. Evidently the two didn't enjoy the same foods. Diego ate the berry after Raph had a look at it and decided that he agreed with Friender on this one.

Diego chittered happily and hopped up a pile of rocks and then sprang onto Raph's shoulder. Friender, who had been sitting in Raph's hand, gibbered insistently until Raph helped him join Diego. Raph wasn't clear on whether the slugs he had were male or female, and something in the back of his mind suggested that slugs were one of those weird animals that was both at the same time, or maybe one after the other, but he decided for the sake of his own peace of mind to call them both 'he' instead of 'it'.

Raph then thought about the two options at his disposal. He could either try to make it across this hazardous cavern of crumbling black rocks and lava, or else he could turn around and take the tunnel he'd decided not to take the night before. Or, of course, he could go back the way he'd come and see if there wasn't some other way to go that he hadn't noticed before. Three options then. And he wasn't particularly pleased with any of them, truth be known.

He decided to continue doing what he had been doing. He asked the slugs what they thought about it.

With total disregard for the disdain and open laughter many had for those who spoke to animals, Raph detailed his problems to the slugs. He told them that he had three brothers that might be lost like himself. He explained that he needed to find them and, more immediately, some water (and he wouldn't say no to a bite of food as well). He also expressed his desire to avoid ghouls where possible (and really, he admitted with reluctance, trouble of any sort). He explained everything of relevance that he could think of. And then, having done so, he asked the slugs what they thought he should do.

The slugs had listened more and less attentively, with Friender being the more and Diego being the less. They now turned to each other and chirped amongst themselves.

Though both were wild slugs, they knew a bit about slingers, and were quite certain that asking slugs for directions was highly irregular. They weren't sure whether to be honored or worried about it. Being wild, they had never had cause to figure out exactly what it was that slingers ate, and neither of them had seen a slinger like Raph before anyway, so they hadn't a clue where to find three more like him. But one thing they did know was the caverns of Slugterra.

After a bit of debate, they decided that the best thing to do would be to guide Raph to a populated cavern, in the hopes that other people might be more effective at solving his problems. As a backup plan, they determined to take him to different types of inhabited caverns, all the way to Quiet Lawns Cavern if absolutely necessary. They were agreed on helping him (though Friender was more thoroughly so on this point, having known Raph for longer, and having been defended from ghouls by him), and if it took awhile to solve his problems, then it would simply take awhile.

They argued a bit about which way he should go. Diego was set on the notion of the nearest cavern, but Friender was equally convinced that the relative distance was of less import than the relative friendliness of the people that lived there. He reminded Diego that Raph had expressed the desire to avoid trouble, and Diego reluctantly conceded his point.

To Raph, it was all just gibbering and wild gesturing, but at least they seemed to be discussing the issue. It was Friender who finally addressed him directly, looking him dead in the eye and pointing at the lakes of lava. Raph sighed wearily. He'd been afraid of that. More out of the desire to keep Diego from feeling inadequate than anything, Raph gave the second slug a glance. Diego shrugged, but then pointed in the same direction. Well, the slugs were agreed then.

"Across the lava cave it is, then," Raph said, trying to muster up something akin to lively enthusiasm about the venture, but the closest he could come was a bit of lethargic apathy.

He tested his bitten leg, and it seemed to be able to at least briefly hold some weight. Even so, he realized this was going to be a slow, and rather painful, journey. He hoped he didn't have far to go.

* * *

Don regained consciousness, and immediately regretted it.

Unlike Raph, he was not surprised to find himself still in the company of slugs. What did surprise him was that they were all loose. When he had passed out, they'd still been in the container. But now they were sprawled out around him (some of them were on top of him, but he hadn't noticed these) in various states of repose, and a small pile of still smoking ashes in front of him suggested there had been a fire there not long ago.

There was also a curious pile of nuts, seeds, berries and other tiny bits of plants, including some three distinct types of leaf. The pile was about six inches high and more of a pyramid than anything.

Don took all of this in only after it had become apparent to him that he was hurt. The reason he regretted his consciousness returning to him was that the first thing it let him know was that his shoulder was stiff, sore and that was before he even tried moving it at all.

An examination revealed that the damage began in the space between the two parts of his shell. A single, deep gash ran across the top of his shoulder. As it traveled down his arm, it wove from side to side and was sometimes joined by a second, equally deep, claw mark. These two marks terminated just above the elbow, though a deep gouge was in his forearm just past the elbow, a third claw no doubt. The tendon and muscle damage was extensive.

Don found he couldn't lift his arm hardly at all, and even attempting to do so hurt tremendously more than the effort was worth. The remarkable thing about bodies is that every part of them is connected. The gouge at his elbow did damage to his left hand as well (that being where related tendons connected), preventing all but one finger from moving.

Other parts of his body were bruised and battered, and some muscles felt strained as a result of his frantic escape attempts. Moving at all was agony, and he wondered if there was any reason to do it.

He groaned and shifted slightly. A cascade of squeaking slugs tumbled down off him and landed in a heap on the ground. He blinked at them without comprehension, wondering where they'd come from, and if there was any reason he should care. He wasn't really thinking clearly, but especially unclearly for him. Whether it was grogginess of sleep, disorientation or perhaps just blood loss was unclear as well. But, whatever the case, the pile of slugs seemed more interesting than it had any right to be.

An absurdly chipper looking reddish-orange and white slug righted itself and climbed up on top of the heap. It chirped cheerfully, and that got the other slugs' rather lackadaisical attention. The red-orange slug then hopped over to the pile of plants. It seemed to be looking at Don expectantly, then it glanced at the pile. It pointed with a flipper-like limb and chattered at Don.

Don continued to stare at it. He felt rather foolish about it, but he couldn't think of anything better to do with himself, since almost anything else required moving and he had already exhausted the possibilities there and found none of them to be appealing.

The slug fumed. It fumed so hard a tiny spark erupted on top of its head and then puffed out. It opened its mouth wide and pointed into its mouth with the flipper. It said "Ah".

"You want to go to the dentist," Don suggested.

The slug fumed at him again, and repeated the gesture.

"You want me to feed you," Don theorized.

The slug slapped its forehead with the flipper. It then picked up a berry, stuffed it in its mouth, munched it up and swallowed it. Then it picked up another berry, set it on the ground and very carefully rolled it towards Don. It nodded encouragingly, saying "Eh!"

Comprehension dawdled up out of the dark recesses of Don's mind and crawled awkwardly across his face. Without saying anything about it, he slowly moved his right hand enough to pick up the berry and put it in his mouth. It was very small, virtually tasteless, but otherwise not objectionable.

The slug applauded as though it was a proud parent who had just seen their child walk for the first time.

They repeated the communication process, more successfully with each repetition, and it was only after the third time that it finally dawned on Don that this was truly remarkable. Something about being a talking turtle raised by a rat had dulled his sense of the fantastic.

"You can talk," Don said to the slug.

It tilted its head, as though trying to fathom the significance of this statement, rather than understand it at all. Don couldn't think of anything else to say for awhile. The slug understood speech. It had clearly communicated in a way that was very human. The slugs had built the fire. They had gathered the food. They had... well... they'd been taking care of him the same way people would.

Don had understood their weaponized significance fairly rapidly, and had recognized that the slugs were afraid of becoming ghouls, but it only now dawned on him that they were also intelligent.

"Amazing," he said finally and, at last locating his wayward manners, added, "Thanks, guys."

* * *

Leo had thought he was the first one up the next morning, but he soon found out that he was wrong. He found Eli a respectable number of yards from camp, playing with his slugs.

"You're up early," Leo remarked.

"Couldn't sleep," Eli admitted, "I was thinking about that mutagen stuff you told us about. You're really a mutant?" he couldn't help but ask again.

He was used to the people of Slugterra, many of whom were not human, but troll or Molenoid or something even more remarkable. However, not one of them was a "mutant". The closest thing Eli had ever seen to a mutant was a ghoul, and the two turtles seemed nothing like one of those.

"Would my saying it again make it more believable?" Leo asked, then answered himself, "Mutagen is one of those things you kinda have to see to believe. I mean, I am what I am because of it, but I don't remember ever being any other way. It didn't become real for me until I saw it work on someone else."

He held up his hand and Cappy the Tazerling hopped out onto it.

"Sort of like these slugs. If you'd told me about them, I probably wouldn't have believed it. Even with all I've seen, nothing prepared me for these guys."

"Speaking of," Eli said, "you want to learn more about the ones you have, and some ways you can use them in a fight? Your moves are pretty good, I'll admit, but watching you yesterday was painful at times. You really have no idea how to go about selecting your slugs."

"Guns aren't really my thing," Leo admitted.

"Slinging isn't really about the blaster," Eli explained, "It's about choosing your battles and, more importantly, your slugs. And also figuring out how to use them. The beginning of that is finding out what they are basically capable of, and then training with them to perfect moves based on their individual abilities. Their personality has a role to play in it too."

"Really?" Leo asked.

"Sure. Even if Burpy was... say, an Armashelt, I still wouldn't use him the same way I use Banger," Leo had no idea what an Armashelt was or which slug was Banger, but he didn't interrupt, "And, besides personality, there's also skills to consider. Burpy and Banger are very experienced slugs, and they also know me pretty well, meaning they're good at knowing exactly what I want them to do without my having to explain it to them. There's usually not a lot of time for conversation in a fight, so having slugs who know you, and that you know, is pretty important."

"So what you're saying is I should get to know my slugs better."

"Exactly."

"Alright," Leo said, "How about a friendly duel? Loser gets to keep his slugs."

Eli grinned, "Thought you'd never ask."


	8. This, That and the Other Problem

It became apparent to Don -and fairly rapidly at that- that sitting around wasn't really getting him very far in life; even considering that the alternative to that was being in rather large amounts of pain.

For one thing the slugs, though well meaning, had not actually supplied him with much that could be considered turtle food. For another, Don felt naked without his Bo Staff (which was presumably still attached to the Demon Ghoul's menacing tail) and he was determined to secure some manner of weapon, preferably of the variety that the henchmen (whoever they had belonged to) had.

It was his theory that the slugs he had could be shot from blasters just as he'd seen with the ghouls, though he had no evidence to support it thus far. But he wouldn't find out if he didn't pilfer, borrow, build or otherwise acquire a blaster of his own for testing purposes.

He also had a third thing on his mind, and that was the device the Kraang had been toying with just before Don and they had been transported to... wherever this was. It was his theory (he had a goodly number of them at this point) that the device was responsible for their transportation. The last place he'd seen it was where the Kraang and henchmen had been fighting.

Having been captured and hauled away in a cart pulled by a Mecha Beast, Don knew he was quite a distance from the object of his desire. Not only did he need a weapon, he also needed one of those four-legged tank-like monstrosities in order to travel more quickly to his intended destination. Or, let's be honest about it, to get there at all. He was not getting far on foot, not injured as he was.

All of this thinking brought him to a very unsatisfactory conclusion. He decided to think it over two or three more times before settling on the answer he'd come up with. It didn't look any better the second time over. He didn't like the third time at all, and the fourth was simply too much; he decided to stop thinking it over.

There was nothing for it, the only sign of civilization he'd seen was the building where he'd been imprisoned. It was his only likely source of weaponry, transport and food. There was also a dull throbbing in his arm that told him medical supplies needed to be added to the list.

The trouble was that it was very possible the henchmen were still about, though Don's real concern was that they weren't because the building had been taken over by the henchman roasting Demon Ghoul. The prospect of seeing it again -much less facing it in battle- was daunting.

Don wished fervently that Leo was here. He wished for Raph in a somewhat more tepid, but still fervent, manner. Heck, given the circumstances, he would be willing to accept Mikey if none of his other brothers were available. But wishing got him nowhere regardless of its temperature.

"Alright," Don said, deciding to do something more productive than wish for something that was simply not to be, "Let's see what you guys can do."

The slugs looked at him curiously. They seemed to expect him to do something. When he didn't do it, they seemed to be somewhat taken aback, maybe even offended. Finally, with a beleaguered shrug, the reddish-orange slug who seemed to be the ringleader of the bunch lit his head on fire briefly.

"That's it," Don nodded in approval, "What can the rest of you do?"

Now that understanding had taken place, the slugs took turns performing their various tricks. They weren't very impressive tricks. But Don had a theory about that too. The slugs would, hopefully, be much more powerful once transformation occurred, however that was accomplished. For now, they could make small fires, spit some water, spray a little webbing and other small tricks.

Don knew the value of the small. He'd made many small inventions that never seemed to impress anyone when he talked about them, even though they were often the most complex to build and most versatile once perfected. He hoped the slugs would cooperate with his current plan.

He pointed to the container, lifting the strap on it and then performing an elaborate form of charades to convey that he meant to carry it and would very much like it if the slugs would hop in. They agreed to this maneuver with apparent glee. Don hefted the strap over his good shoulder, adjusted it so it would be as comfortable as possible and set out to return to the building he'd escaped from.

He made a mental note to find a better thing to carry slugs in. Not only was the container unwieldy and actually quite heavy, the slugs slid and bounced around in it as Don walked, and they didn't appear to be enjoying that very much.

* * *

Kord had improved Leo's blaster first. While he was working on Mikey's Mecha Beast, Leo opted to travel to a nearby cavern that was hosting a duel. There were, of course, a lot of them. Dueling with Eli to improve his skills was all well and good, but Leo knew it would be better to actually participate in battles where he had a chance of winning money or slugs.

He was not the scavenger Don was, nor even the one Mikey was, but he did know that more and better equipment would make it easier to look for his brothers. He also had the uneasy awareness that not everyone here was friendly. The better equipped he was when he met some of these unfriendly folks.. well... the better. He also wanted to be able to provide his brothers with weapons and transport whenever he found them, so time wasn't wasted doing that.

He didn't really know what came after, but he hoped Don had a plan for that. Don must understand what had transpired and how to get them home, right? Leo was going to bet his life on it. He didn't really have another option.

Mikey had his own solution to their monetary problems, and it wasn't entirely a stupid one. Though his methods were stupefyingly simple and offensive to common sense, Mikey was proving to be quite adept at catching wild slugs.

Though he wasn't sure it was a good idea, Leo left Mikey in the company of Pronto who, though inept, was passionate about showing his minimal prowess when it came to the fine art of capturing slugs.

Eli and Trixie went with Leo, leaving Kord to his own devices.

"I'm not just going to sit on the sidelines today," Trixie told Eli, "I don't get a chance to compete often anymore, and I kinda miss it."

Eli was much too attached to his slugs to bear the thought of parting with any of them in the event that he lost. Especially since he had some which, even aside from their value as friends, were irreplaceable in abilities. But rather than stand around watching, Eli decided to do some asking around the cavern to see if anyone had seen anything resembling Leo and Mikey, or if Blakk Industries had been up to anything nefarious that the Shane Gang needed to put a stop to.

From one experienced Slugterran cavern guide, Eli heard that someone had told the guide that a friend of theirs had said that their dearest aunt had heard a rumor of a distant Blakk Industries manufacturing plant going belly up for reasons which were undetermined.

An apparently unrelated rumor, gleaned from one of the people who appeared to be professional tellers of tall tales at drink vending establishments where such stories were appreciated, pertained to some sort of dark monster roaming the caverns, eating the slugs of slingers, burning everything it came across and leaving a tar-like black slime in its wake. Eli determined that this was the Slugterran version of an urban legend.

Pronto was the champion of tall tales, so Eli was used to hearing them. But he never fully disregarded them, because there might be a grain of truth. After all, the Burning World was one of these tales, and Eli (having come from there) knew perfectly well that this was no myth.

Still, Eli took the story with a large cupful of salt.

But the story about the shutdown manufacturing plant bore looking into. Eli wanted to know if it was true and, if so, why it had come to be that way. He was always looking for ways to foil Blakk's plans and, in his spare time, he also investigated projects that seemed to be producing results of a possibly deadly nature. A manufacturing plant that died as the result of a failed, highly dangerous, experiment was sometimes the precursor to the result of a successful, highly dangerous, invention.

Even aside from all that, Eli wanted to have some manner of direction in these travels. They couldn't just bumble around forever looking for lost turtles. The Shane Gang did have a responsibility to the 99 Caverns to protect them from harm. That couldn't be simply forgotten just because something peculiar had happened. If that were allowed to pass, the Shane Gang would never get anywhere.

Eli located Leo between matches and explained to him about the rumors he'd heard and in particular the one wanted to look into. He didn't have to explain to Leo why he wanted to look into it, the blue-masked turtle seemed to able to firmly grasp the concept of Blakk Industries with little difficulty.

"Who knows?" Leo shrugged agreeably, "Maybe Don or Raph had something to do with it."

This seemed unlikely but, since they both knew that already, it didn't bear saying aloud.

Leo seemed relieved to have some kind of direction in life and, after winning his final match of the day, agreed to return to Kord to find out when the turtles' Mecha Beast would be ready to travel. He traded his won slugs for a blaster (this one was actually in pretty fair shape) and hoped Mikey had expanded his arsenal in the meantime by catching wild slugs.

* * *

"The key to capturing slugs," Pronto told Mikey in one of his more dramatic voices, "is to remember that you are more intelligent than they are," he pointed a purposeful finger towards where one of his brains lurked in his skull, "and use your powerful mind to outsmart them."

"That seems hard," Mikey said, scratching his head, "Couldn't I just, you know, catch them?"

"Oh no, no, no, no!" Pronto wagged a disapproving finger at Mikey, decided it wasn't really having the intended effect and put it away again before continuing in the same voice used car salesmen the world over employ when trying to sell someone a weather-beaten (and often stick-beaten) secondhand vehicle that's missing its engine and two hubcaps for the same price as a brand new sports car, "Slugs are very quick, you cannot win with reflexes alone, my friend. You must use your vast intellect against their little tiny one. They have only one brain, and it would fit on the head of a pin."

This gave Mikey pause. Was a slug's brain the same as an angel? If so, then could only one angel dance on the head of a pin? He then was given to wonder why an angel should wish to do such a clearly absurd thing. After several seconds of medium level concentration, he decided that the answer was simply that they could and wanted to rub it in everyone's face.

By this point, he had entirely forgotten what they were talking about, but it didn't matter, because Pronto had already moved on into telling stories of his most glorious exploits involving the capturing of wily slugs, in the meantime getting half to two-thirds of the details entirely wrong.

Mikey, of course, believed every word, and sat enthralled.

Pronto, delighted to have such an attentive audience for once, went into full egocentric tale spinning of glory, victory and other things which were meant to make whoever listened feel awed by his mere presence, but which more often resulted in his being tossed on his can out of drink vending establishments where such stories were usually appreciated (sometimes, just for the sake of variety, he was tossed out on his ear instead. In any case, a lot of Molenoid tossing was involved).

Mikey then regaled Pronto with a select few of the stories that usually got him slapped or punched by one or more of his brothers. Pronto interrupted every few minutes to go off on a tangent of his own and, all in all, they were having a wonderfully good time and failing to accomplish anything useful whatsoever (which only added to their enjoyment of it, for nothing is quite so pleasurable as avoiding any meaningful work in favor of telling stories which give full and lyrical description of one's own -likely mostly fictional, but nevertheless- good qualities).

By the time Leo, Eli and Trixie returned, Pronto and Mikey had managed to waste the entire day and had not caught a single, solitary slug between them.

* * *

If anyone has ever wondered what lies between caverns (aside from train tracks and flumes), they have only to look at the long stretches of road between small towns which are situated at least a hundred miles from the nearest city of any noteworthy size or name. And then imagine that without roads, barbed wire fences and telephone poles. Next imagine that there are no fields or trees, and that the only landmarks are just that: marks on the land. And then imagine that this has steep ravines, yawning canyons, imposing cliffs, impervious stalagmites, staggering stalactites and condescending ledges which openly dare you to call them a "path". Put atop all this the crowning feeling of utter isolation that results only in places which cannot be rightly called places, which have things in them which cannot rightly be called things, and the total abdication of the flora and fauna you might find somewhere else.

Then imagine mile after mile after mile of this, punctuated only by small, dark tunnels that lead off to possibly nowhere, maybe more of the same and -though it be extremely unlikely- perhaps an actual cavern where plants grow, slugs flourish and -if you're very lucky- people inhabit.

The silence in such places is oppressive, though the oppression can be regularly counted on to lift in favor of eery echoes, the lonely cries of animals who have gotten lost from their own cavern and are now in the process of slow starvation, and the terrified screams of the creatures unfortunate enough to be found by these animals and subsequently used to further slow the starvation.

In short, the reason nobody ever spends time talking about the places between places is that the only thing to be described in loneliness and, as a break from tedium, sheer unadulterated terror.

There is a very good reason that no one in Slugterra travels without a Mecha Beast to carry them as quickly as possible through these non-places and into areas which are much more pleasant, or at the least very different. The between cavern places are the sorts of places that parents on road trips with their families threaten to leave the children if they don't "pipe down, play nice, and take the toy dinosaur out of your brother's ear".

Once the horror of the sight of such open emptiness had worn off, Raph also discovered the between caverns areas to be almost deathly boring, and he faintly wished he had a brother's ear in which to put a toy dinosaur. He felt that this would likely relieve the boredom, which was even more tyrannical than the silence, though he couldn't be sure because he'd never been on such a road trip as would lead his parent to threaten to leave him in this boring, quiet, empty place and therefore had never really tried using a toy dinosaur in the suggested manner to relieve boredom.

All in all, a great deal of nothing happened, combined with experiences which weren't really very interesting, and also sights which weren't worth the trouble to describe them.

If it makes a difference at all, it should be noted that he became very tired, and more hungry than he had been before; but that too is hardly worth describing.

* * *

By an exceptional coincidence, this journey of boredom was about to be undertaken by Leo, Mikey and the Shane Gang as well. It was no more interesting, but slightly less lonely and very much shorter.


	9. Journey of Discovery

Don approached the scorched front of the building with the trepidation of someone who had already been inside it once and had left under the strong impression that this was just the sort of building where Satan himself would choose to conduct affairs of an especially despicable nature.

He examined the debris in front of the entrance with the unease of someone who knew that they were looking at what had once been an impregnable door, and then stepped into the doorway as would one who knew that there should (in a proper and well ordered world) be an impregnable door there.

Nothing happened for several seconds.

Don squinted into the quiet darkness beyond the open doorway, carefully avoiding any visual contact with the hinges of the door, which had been so well set that, even as the door was ripped out of the wall and shattered, they remained stolidly in place, now holding up only the ghostly memory of an impregnable door.

Nothing continued to happen.

Emboldened by this inactivity, Don took a step inside and peered through the gloom. He remembered the place as having been rather better lit than this, and concluded that either the power had been cut, or something which made infinitely less sense had transpired while he was away. He hoped it was the former, because he always preferred for the universe to make some kind of sense.

Nothing was getting extraordinarily proficient at happening, and proceeded to demonstrate this ability full force with all the vigor of someone who knows they are very good at their job.

The building, what was left of it, appeared to be deserted.

Don fumbled in the dark for a light switch (just in case some kind of nonsense had taken place and it was just the lights that were out) and found what felt very much like a SPARCstation 2. He hastily withdrew his hand, just in case it was possible to contract some kind of disease by touching a hideously outdated piece of computer equipment.

 _The problem with evil alien lairs,_ Don thought to himself as he crept through the darkness, _is that there's no logic to the design. The Kraang may have the most counter intuitive computer system in the known universe._

That was as far as the Kraang's winning streak in utter nonsense went (not counting the language barrier), because whoever ran this place would have taken the trophy for absurd building layout if there had been one, and then they probably would have tried to use it as a chandelier.

Don eventually found a button he didn't feel too badly about pressing and turned on the lights. He then turned them back off, took a steadying breath, and turned them back on again.

The interior hadn't been all that nice to look at before, but now it was a shambles. There were no henchmen, no slugs and no ghouls, merely debris that offered notice of their passing but did not leave a forwarding address.

It also appeared that an explosion had gone off and demolished a number of electronics, tables, chairs, and anything else lying around. Only instead of shrapnel, everything was coated in slime, ooze and other less identifiable forms of goo that Don didn't care to think about.

Don decided that, before he went cavorting about the place in search of something useful or informative, he should see if he couldn't find a room that held food.

He went through the door nearest to him, discovered it was a closet and went out again. The next room was no more helpful, if anything it was less so because there were three doors out of it aside from the one Don had just entered through. He tried them all in turn, but two were locked and the third led to a storage area for the kind of large shipping crates facilities like this kept around just in case they suddenly needed to send a lot of packing peanuts and a single, tiny plastic microchip across the country or perhaps to a different country altogether. Don left the room.

Eventually, Don did manage to find a break room. In it there was a fridge, and the contents could at least pass for food. Don removed a sandwich from the fridge and ate someone else's lunch.

He then tried in vain to get something in the building besides the lights to run. Normally, Don was very good with machines. The trouble was that these machines didn't run on electricity as he knew it, but on slug energy, which was a concept he had never heard of. The lights ran on something which would have made even less sense to him.

He took several machines apart to see what wasn't making them tick, but their insides proved even less illuminating than their outsides. He decided that he should stomp around for awhile to clear his head.

The slugs, whose container he had set down near the entrance, sat and watched him. They listened to him mutter mathematical figures to himself, and waited patiently while he tried in vain to explain to himself that it really wasn't his fault he couldn't make these machines run. No doubt they were like the technology of the Kraang, which was totally incomprehensible for anyone with more IQ points than a sedated frog sitting on a lemon. Or was it fewer? Not that it mattered.

The slugs came to the slow realization that Don had no idea how anything in their world operated. This came as a profound shock to them. All Slugterrans knew what slug energy was, at least on a grade school level. But their new master appeared to have never even heard of it.

Being the helpful little slugs they were, they attempted to acquire Don's attention -and through a mixture of charades and interpretive dance- to explain the world to him. Unfortunately, none of them had ever obtained a teaching license, nor was it likely that they would be able to in the future.

"I don't have time for games," Don said, offering them a dismissive wave and turning away.

The slugs rejected the wave and continued trying in various ways to show him what it was they knew that he did not know but needed to know if ever he was to function in Slugterra. Don, for his part, continued to stomp around and ignore them.

"Ah ha!" Don had found a room with Mecha Beasts in it and, when he explored the nearest one, was delighted to discover that the power switch had the effect of bringing it to life with a roar of its engine, "Now we're getting somewhere."

Where he got, precisely, was face first into a wall.

On his first attempt to make the thing move, Don managed to cause it to buck, lurch onto its front limbs and propel itself forward at an impractical speed. It smashed into another Mecha Beast, and Don went flying into the nearest wall.

Don was thrilled.

This was geek heaven, or nerd nirvana, or something. It was definitely something.

He spent a delightful forty-five minutes crashing about and banging his head into walls repeatedly before finally figuring out that the problem lay in the fact that he had only one good arm, and driving the beast required two if you were going to do it right.

He had almost forgotten his hurt arm, so exciting was the discovery of the Mecha Beast room.

Don decided to go find a first aid kit or something before he forgot again.

The slugs had found it for him, and had actually managed to haul it into the Mecha Beast room. They had been waiting patiently for him to quit crashing his head into walls and sober up. Had they been his parents, it is very probable that they would have threatened to leave him somewhere between caverns.

As it was, they simply squeaked angrily and waved their limbs emphatically at him.

Don was properly chastened, but nothing could dampen his enthusiasm.

After messing about with (and mostly misusing) the first aid kit, he dismantled a Mecha Beast, oohed and aahed over its interior bits, then lost interest and wandered off in search of a blaster so he could take that apart as well and see which of his several thousand theories about blasters was the right one.

The slugs followed him, shaking their heads.

* * *

The Demon Ghoul heaved itself about the clearing angrily. That it had absolutely nothing to be angry about did not diminished its outrage in the slightest. It had found a large number of ghouls already, set fire to their previous owners and had a good meal of terrified slugs. Though its intestines put forth no complaint, it was thoroughly dissatisfied by the meal, and it had been particularly bothersome that it felt as though the bite sized morsels had gone down with a lot more wriggling and screaming than seemed necessary. They were only going to be eaten, that was hardly cause for such a tantrum.

The Demon Ghoul heaved itself about again, its sharp eyes darting about in search of something or someone which could provoke the kind of vengeful anger it was presently feeling.

But there was no one around, much less anyone doing something offensive. The most annoying thing about was the adoring pack of ghouls which stood at the Demon Ghoul's feet with a wretchedly mindless look of worship which they insisted on directing at what they seemed to believe was their God.

The Demon Ghoul huffed at them, and they scattered momentarily, then quickly returned more resolute than before to burden it with their asinine adoration. But it was very difficult to be angry with creatures who looked upon you as a deity and were willing to do whatever you asked of them without hesitation.

The Demon Ghoul tried it, but met with little success.

What it really needed was a good enemy, or at the very least a challenging bit of prey. It felt that another snack would be an acceptable temporary alternative to destructive rage.

Unfortunately, the Demon Ghoul had either eaten all the slugs in the area or at least frightened them away. The cavern was now as empty of slugs as one of those blasted between places where creatures like the Demon Ghoul tended to lurk so that they could jump on unsuspecting travelers and rob them of their lives and any other valuables they might have on their person.

Then, from a stony crevice, came some new ghouls. They went right up to the Demon Ghoul and prostrated themselves before it.

At first the Demon Ghoul ignored them. But then it caught a scent and, looking around wildly, it found that the source was on one of the new slugs. It snatched the slug from the ground with a cruel claw and peered more closely at it. The slug had blood on its fangs.

The Demon Ghoul inhaled the fragrance deeply.

Now here was the scent of something worth running down and killing. The scent jogged a memory in the Demon Ghoul's brain. It decided to eat the slug with the scent on it, so that the memory might jog about less openly. It gulped, swallowed, then burped.

Then it lifted its grotesque head and snuffed at the air. Finding the desired trail, the Demon Ghoul set at once to following it. It had no particular reason for doing this, just that it didn't have anything better to do at the moment. The cultish mass of ghouls hopped along behind it.

The Demon Ghoul hoped that the source of the trail would be something (or else be doing something) which it could get really steamed about. After all, it was a product of twisted science and accident and so had no real purpose in life other than to prove that this was just the sort of science that man was not meant to toy with. To that end, it thought to follow this trail and destroy whatever signs of civilization it came across along the way. The purpose of monsters is to be as monstrous as possible and just now the Demon Ghoul was doing fantastically well where fulfilling that mission was concerned.

The Demon Ghoul had caught the scent of Raph's blood.

And now it was hunting him.

* * *

On a totally unrelated note, Leo had the unwonted and dubious honor of being the first turtle to get seasick on dry land, and Mikey the distinction of being the first one to have caused the same. It wasn't that he was a bad Mecha driver, merely that he was an absolutely atrocious one.

Aside from this, the journey was both uneventful and uninteresting.


	10. Civilization, Such as It Is

Raph would be among the first to admit that he hadn't seen much of the world.

Up until recently, he hadn't even been out of the New York sewer system. So far, he had expanded his world experience to places in New York which were not the sewer system. This was a pretty fair expansion all things considered, but it in no way prepared him for the arrangement of mushroom-like structures that seemed to pass as homes and shops, the tiny electrified corrals that seemed to be designed to keep slugs inside, the large robotic animals that were ridden about as casually as one might ride a tractor, or the high ratio of guns to people (there were more guns than people, because some people had two guns and everyone -children included- carried them).

Raph didn't know that the blasters were for firing slugs, or that there were plenty of nonviolent reasons for firing one. Some of these gun toting people were, in fact, pacifists. And some of them were... well, not at all human. Of all the strangeness that Raph took in from his hiding place in a forest of shrubs and oversized mushrooms, this was the least startling to him. Being mutant turtles with a talking rat for a father, Raph and his brothers had practically written the book on people who weren't all human.

Though Raph didn't entirely agree with Splinter's paranoia about being seen by people, he decided that here was an instance where there was wisdom in following his Sensei's advice and remaining in the shadows. It seemed to him that the inhabitants of this cavern must be very unfriendly if they had to put up electrified fencing to keep their slugs confined, rode about on robotic animals with very large teeth, and let even their children wander about bearing arms.

He had it all wrong, of course, but it was an easy and obvious mistake to make.

To the uninitiated, Slugterra looked like nothing so much as one of those small towns in old western movies where the bad guys in the black hats went around shooting up the saloons and beating up slovenly and inept sheriffs until someone in a white hat came along to put a stop to it by shooting everything in sight until the muzzle of his infinite bullet gun managed to waggle in the general direction of the villain, who would spontaneously have a heart attack and fall over. Then something about sunsets and not giving a damn would be said and the town's people would rejoice by throwing their hats into the air and firing upward with their infinite bullet guns, just to prove that they couldn't hit anything either.

Raph never watched those kinds of movies, but he had heard of them.

As if to prove the utter savagery of these odd people, a young girl picked up her gun, inserted a slug of all things into it, and fired. The gun being nearly as big as she was, she was knocked back on her butt, as the slug launched from the end of the gun and proceeded to grow very much bigger. The slug wheeled in the air over a field, spouting water from its mouth, drenching the plants below.

Raph tried to resolve this into something that made sense to him. He couldn't manage it, and decided not to worry about it. He was always at his best when ignoring things he didn't understand in the hopes that they would go away.

But he didn't entirely ignore Friender when the Fandango slug chirped and pointed excitedly at the girl and her blaster, nodding his head vigorously. Diego seemed a bit apathetic about the whole thing, and after a good yawn, decided to take a nap of Raph's shoulder.

"You mean you can do that too?" Raph inquired of Friender, then looked over to see the water spitting slug pop back into the small size to which Raph had become accustomed and land in the hand of the girl who had just shot it out of what -in comparison to the girl and her slug- qualified as a small cannon.

"Mm-hmm Mm-hmm!" Friender exalted with an enthusiastic nod that would have made a bobble head jealous.

"And you actually _want_ to be shot," Raph's brain was coping with this as best it could, which wasn't very well, possibly on account of its primary purpose in life having become that of constantly reminding him about how hungry he was.

Friender applauded.

Raph decided that he'd better reconsider his first impression of the town. The slugs being able to transform and shoot water onto plants via the guns everyone had, and the additional fact of their seeming to enjoy it very much made the whole concept Raph had formed of the town skew terribly.

The first thing to reconsider was the electric fencing surrounding the slug corral. Perhaps it wasn't meant to keep slugs in, but to keep something _else_ out. Or maybe it was just for keeping wild slugs confined until they grew used to domestic life, in the same way as wild horses were kept locked up until they accepted their new role as a mode of transport.

The guns might not even really be guns. Certainly they functioned on the same principles as guns, but maybe they weren't weapons at all, but really just glorified farm equipment, like a backhoe or a tractor.

Raph tried this new logic on the town, and it made much more sense to him after that.

Even so, he decided that discretion was the better part of valor, and the best part of discretion was the bit about being discreet, and a word that in some way related to discreet was unnoticed, so it would be the best of all worlds for Raph to continue going unnoticed by the townsfolk.

After pilfering an unattended sack lunch, Raph climbed onto a mushroom and spent the remaining daylight hours watching the odd town with its odd inhabitants going about their odd lives.

Though it was not his habit to pilfer other people's belongings -except by way of their trashcans- Raph didn't feel particularly guilty about the sack lunch. In his defense, he was very hungry and -for the moment- had no other means of providing himself with food.

Using this same rickety logic, he determined that he would swipe a gun from someone who had two in order to satisfy the obviously heartfelt desire of Friender to be fired out of one. He also decided that, should he acquire a third slug somehow, he was going to name it Bullet, since becoming one was evidently a slug's highest aspiration.

Through semi-careful observation, Raph discovered that different slugs had different abilities, and it set him to wondering what his two slugs might do when transformed. None of the farm slugs looked like the two he had, which led him to assume that Friender and Diego would make poor farmers.

That was alright though, agriculture had never interested him anyway.

The pilfering of the blaster went off without a hitch, whereupon Raph decided that a suitable course of action would be to put as much distance between himself and the site of the theft as was possible for a teenage mutant ninja turtle traveling on foot across a country he had no useful knowledge of.

* * *

Society likes to think of scientists as being highly sensible, even refined, with thick glasses, incorrigible social awkwardness and the desire to slather incomprehensible Latin words all over everything.

But, as history has recorded it, scientists are the sort of people who stick their fingers in light sockets to see what happens. And then do it again to see if the effect is repeatable or merely a one time occurrence, because their mandate states that a thing is not real unless you can prove it exists and works as theorized by repeated demonstration.

They are the sort of people who put other people in a dark room for a week just to see if they can prove that some disorder or the other is caused by an absence of sunlight. They are also the sort of people who claim that the mere act of measuring something alters it, yet insist on precise measurements anyway. They're the sort of people who fall down and can't get up, not because it's physically impossible, but because they have to experiment around until they find the "best way", which they are quite certain is not the way that anybody else would use to get up.

That's not to say that scientists and inventors and their relatives are stupid, merely that they appear to exist in a little reality bubble from which the rest of the universe is excluded.

If they fail to learn Latin, they are likely to end up in an asylum somewhere, where they will spend much of the time discussing the virtues of wallpaper versus wood paneling with table lamps.

What all of this means, of course, is that the line between brilliance and insanity is very thin, not particularly visible and not at all provable by scientific methods.

Don had spent the day, and most of the night, recklessly weaving back and forth across it like a drunk on roller skates.

After some sleep and another lunch, he sobered up and got down to the rather more serious business of actually figuring out where he should go, and what he would need to bring if he was to get there.

He had found the power generator for the building, but couldn't figure out how to make it function. It had been torn open and had something removed from it, but he didn't know what it was.

His slugs were getting quite good at working around his obvious handicap (which was not so much his immobile arm as his total ignorance of all things Slugterran), and managed to get the generator running for him. The discovery that the facility was powered by slugs had taken some time to fully accept.

Once he had power, Don went after the computers with vigor. Though they weren't exactly like what he was used to, they were close enough that he paid the difference little mind. Finding the Slugterran internet, Don threw himself into learning about the place with vigor.

He learned about slugslinging, about the 99 Caverns, Blakk Industries (which he quickly and accurately determined to be evil), The Shane (and his gang), dueling, ghouls, slug energy, the abilities, names and descriptions of various kinds of slug, the operation and maintenance of Mecha Beasts and a great many other things he had already begun to put together from his admittedly limited experiences in Slugterra.

He also made the unhappy discovery that New York was nowhere to be found on this internet. It, along with everything else familiar, seemed not to exist. Alternate universe? Different dimension? Don didn't know. Either way, this was bad. Really bad.

The only hope of returning to his home was in the discarded Kraang device. Hopefully it was still there, hopefully it still worked, and hopefully Don could figure out how to reverse whatever it was that it had done. A final hope to put on the pile was that the Demon Ghoul had gone somewhere it wouldn't return from and that the Blakk Industries henchmen wouldn't be back for awhile.

Don decided that the best way to go about avoiding these pitfalls was to gather up everything he could possibly need, put it in a bin, put the bin on wheels and attach it to a Mecha Beast that would first have to be modified so that it was possible to steer with just one hand.

* * *

The Demon Ghoul's progress was not particularly swift.

Every time it saw slugs (and this happened rather often), it felt compelled to chase them and try to eat them. Most of the time they darted into the holes which lay about waiting for just such an occasion as a slug being chased by a hungry Demon Ghoul, but now and then it managed to snag one with a claw.

Without anyone having to tell it, the Demon Ghoul instinctively knew that the tradition of creatures who hunt for sport is to torment their prey mercilessly until the victim either dies from sheer fright or is accidentally impaled upon a carelessly unsheathed killing claw.

The Demon Ghoul had no intention of being one who would fly in the face of gruesome tradition. Indeed, it went at the task of upholding such tradition with a will that would have made a mockery of all other dogged upholders of tradition, gruesome or otherwise. It was so phenomenally dedicated to its work that it even upheld the tradition on some of its ghouls. No reason to confine mindless cruelty to ordinary slugs; people and ghouls deserved some consideration too.

Had the slugs or people been asked about it, they would have vehemently stated that they truly did not want any such consideration and felt that everyone would be very much better off if the Demon Ghoul were somewhat less passionate about upholding gruesome traditions.

The ghouls, being ghouls, had nothing to say on the subject, except maybe that the Demon Ghoul was now their God and whatever he went in for, they were down with it as well.

The Demon Ghoul also found the in between cavern places to be very engaging, particularly when hapless travelers were wandering through. It was most pleased of all when it saw a family of vacationers approaching, the parents loudly declaring that "they would stop this Mecha, drop you off in the wilderness, and go home without you if you kids don't settle down".

Whether or not they were being farcical about this point became irrelevant because they were shortly pushing their Mecha Beast to its top speed in an urgent attempt to get away from the hideous monster that had just leaped out of the shadows and -essentially- shouted "BOO!" at them.

It was their good fortune that the Demon Ghoul, while utterly devoted to the violent slaying of all things living, was somewhat less passionate about the subject of actual chasing. After pursuing no more than two miles, it got bored and decided to go and torment someone else.

Fortunately (for the Demon Ghoul, that is) Slugterra was rife with someone elses to choose from, and many of them would require far less in the way of hot pursuit than the family of vacationers.


	11. A Not So Jolly Caucus Race

"Looks like home," Mikey remarked to no one in particular.

Leo, deciding that he would be the no one in particular to whom Mikey spoke, answered his remark with a comment of his own, "Smells like it too."

Because their destination cavern was so far away from where they were, Eli had suggested that the turtles and Shane Gang take The Flumes to get there. Leo and Mikey had agreed, having no idea what The Flumes were and thus having no compelling reason to avoid going there.

Amazingly enough, Mikey was right.

The Flumes were somewhat familiar and that was oddly comforting. Even the menacing shadows couldn't dispel the subtle comfort of the familiar, and the seasickness was only a mild distraction. They were, as it turned out, a network of watery passageways beneath the caverns of Slugterra, not unlike the New York sewer system.

"Press that," Kord said to Mikey, pointing to a button on the Mecha Beast.

Mikey did not have to be told twice. Leo wasn't sure that Mikey should be encourage to poke buttons, even if they were the correct ones, but said nothing. The Mecha Beast, in obedience to the pressing of the button, transformed itself into something which resembled a jet ski. Leo wasn't at all convinced he liked the comparison, and he was fully convinced that he didn't like Mikey's driving of it.

However, at least Leo could now get seasick on the water, which is the only respectable place to become seasick. Motion sickness had never been a problem before but, then again, Mikey had never been allowed to drive anything that had four limbs that functioned independently of one another before. Wracking his brain, Leo was pretty sure Mikey had never been permitted to drive at all, for precisely the obvious reason.

"Keep an eye out," Eli said, "Sometimes the things in here aren't so friendly."

"Things?" Leo cried, but was drowned out by the motors of the Mecha Beast jet skis as they lurched out into the water, "Did he say _things_!?"

"Don't worry about it, man," Mikey called over his shoulder to Leo, who was sitting directly behind him, "Michelangelo is on driving duty. Nothin' is gonna hit us."

 _I'm more worried about us hitting something,_ Leo thought, but didn't say so.

As they roared along, vague shapes and shadows flitted along the banks of The Flumes, things which were indistinct except in that they were distinctly menacing with a dash of unfriendliness added on for good measure. Leo tried to pretend he couldn't see them.

Still, even in spite of Mikey's tendency to turn left when he should go right and hit the accelerator when he ought to be tapping the breaks, Leo felt more relaxed about things than he had since arriving.

He wanted to ask how long before they arrived, but realized this would be a wasted effort. Even if he could make himself heard over the roar of engines and rush of water, it was unlikely that he would be able to hear the reply, especially if Mikey chose the moment of answer to make another one of his bad decisions about turning left or right.

Leo decided that, if it was at all possible, he would try to meditate to pass the time.

It wasn't, so he didn't.

* * *

While Leo, Mikey and the Shane Gang were hurrying to get to the cavern where Blakk Industries had suddenly abandoned their debatably scientific endeavors and indeed the entire cavern itself, Don was in something of a rush to get very much farther away from it.

This was partly because he had exhausted the head crashing potential of it, but mostly because he had found a holding area full of ghouls who, on seeing him, smashed their way out of their containers and began to chase him.

Having no pressing reason to stay, Don hurriedly gathered up all the things he intended to take with him, put them in a trailer attached to a Mecha Beast, mounted the aforementioned Beast and ran away. It wasn't something he was proud of, but he also didn't feel particularly ashamed about it. It wasn't as though he'd run away and left people in danger. He'd merely run away from an evil installation full of evil little monsters that wanted to eat him in an evil way. There was no shame in that and, anyway, he'd been wasting time exploring new technology when he could have been finding the device for sending himself back home.

Unfortunately, as he approached the exit he wanted, he came across a trail of black slime. This wouldn't have been much of a problem except that his Mecha Beast slipped on the slime and slid away into a different tunnel from the one he intended, and then promptly fell down a hole.

This was not so much an exit passage as one of those naturally formed tunnels, and one that had not come into being with traveling Mecha Beasts in mind. Mecha Beast, turtle and trailer tumbled down a narrow shaft about fifty feet deep, rolled down a steep incline and very nearly sank into a swamp.

Floundering about in the mud took a good eight minutes, largely because Don had been spun so many times on the way down that he wasn't sure which way he'd come from, or if he wanted to go back that way at all. He eventually maneuvered his Mecha up onto a suitably sturdy island of semi-dry land.

He took stock of the situation.

Replaying everything in his mind, he took a guess at where he'd come from, then realized it didn't matter because there was absolutely no way he was getting back up the shaft down which he'd come. It was too deep. Really, he should be grateful he'd managed to get down in one piece. This could largely be attributed to his protective shell, but no small amount of credit goes to the jutting rocks in the shaft which had been crashed into and thus slowed descent to something less than lethal velocity.

The trouble was, he didn't really know where he'd landed. He'd downloaded a map to a laptop he'd swiped, but the shaft he'd fallen down wasn't on it. He took a wild guess at where he was, a cavern that was almost directly beneath the one he'd just left. He then estimated where he must be in the cavern, and from there determined what direction and distance it was to the nearest exit.

Some manner of many toothed creature gurgled up out of the swamp water, snapped a fly out of the air, and went back under with a splash. Don didn't like the thought that there might be a bigger fish in there that ate the one he'd just seen. He checked the online guide to Slugterra he'd found to see what it had to say about crossing swamps, most particularly _this_ swamp.

 _Don't_ , advised the web-page, _unless you have an aquatic mode on your Mecha Beast, an experienced tracker, a minimum of three types of slugs on the Swamp Traveling Slugslinger list (_ the guide advised him to click the link below to see the list) _and..._ the list went on.

Don dragged out the blueprint for the Mecha Beast he had with him. It had an aquatic mode. He checked the list of required slugs and compared it with the ones chirping at him and found he had over half the ones on the list. The one thing he did not have was an experienced tracker.

"Well," he said aloud to himself, "I guess I'll have to do this without one. Unless one of you guys is an experienced tracker?" he glanced at the nearest cluster of slugs, who chirruped and shrugged, "Yeah... I thought that was too much to ask for. Alright," he sighed in what he hoped was a resolute manner, "I can do this. _We_ can do this. Let's go."

He set out on a more or less straight course away from where he'd started.

* * *

If Don was making a straight line, Raph was making a rather drunken looking squiggle. He also was moving away from his starting point, but he was following the opinions of Friender and Diego about which way he should go. He was also taking their advice on foraging.

It was bland fare, and might have been poisonous to a human, but turtles (box turtles especially, though this is of little relevance) frequently snacked on mushrooms which could kill a human person, and Raph had retained at least some of this immunity to toxins. In any case, it was better than algae and worms, which had been the primary diet of Raph and his brothers for fifteen years of their lives.

The slugs were intent upon finding the safest places to forage, perhaps more for their sake than for Raph's, though their motives were at best unclear.

They were also guiding him to the one person they were certain would help. Word travels far and fast in Slugterra, especially between slugs, even wild ones. Friender and Diego knew where Eli Shane and his gang hung out, and had every intention of bringing Raph there.

If anyone could help their turtle friend, they were certain that The Shane would be that one.

But they weren't making the straightest possible beeline for the Hideout. The main reason for this was that Raph was traveling on foot, and it would behoove them to guide him into caverns rather than between cavern areas where they might have to go a long time without food or water.

But there was also the matter of dangerous hoods on the roads, and the two slugs wanted very much to avoid these unsavory characters. They did not doubt Raph's ability to fight, only to sling slugs. They were especially aware that he would likely favor Friender over Diego, which could be a mistake that would cost him his life. Friender had very limited battle capabilities, being a Fandango and all.

It might seem surprising that Raph was willing to blithely follow wherever his slugs pointed, but the truth was that he didn't really enjoy all the thinking that being a leader entailed and, since nobody was around to make fun of him, his pride wasn't at stake. In the moments when he was honest with himself, he knew also that he needed far more knowledge of Slugterra than he had if ever he was going to make a reasonably intelligent decision about where to go and what to do when he got there.

He had also built up considerable trust in Friender's abilities as a guide. Friender hadn't steered him wrong once, always having understood what Raph wanted and also where to go in order to get it. He'd even found Raph a second slug, and having two was somehow very reassuring. Friender had even inadvertently shown Raph where the true value of slug companions lay.

But there was another limiting factor on their progress, and that was Raph's bad leg, which periodically threw a tantrum, folded up under him and refused to come out until he'd regained his senses. Arguing with one's leg has historically been proven to be a futile pursuit, so whenever his leg gave out, Raph decided that it was time to rest. As he didn't know where he was being led or what he was meant to do when he got there, he felt there was no reason to hurry.

Had he known what was tracking him, he might have been a little more aggressive in debating with his leg about whether or not it would carry him just one more mile...

* * *

The Demon Ghoul was experiencing a sensation to which it was unaccustomed.

It had just had a thoroughly exhilarating time burning down a series of huts while the owners of the huts looked on helplessly with tears in their eyes, and then it had spent a further pleasant hour batting aside the slugs which the town's residents fired at it. It had followed this up with a delightful meal of frightened domestic slugs, which were much easier to catch than their wild brethren. It had then settled in the middle of the smoldering main street of the town and had itself a lovely nap.

It was now feeling... a certain lack of something. The natural state of its highly unnatural form was to be extremely angry about everything. After this day's achievements, it was feeling almost satisfied, and it is is very nearly impossible to be satisfied and angry at the same time. One typically excludes the other because one cannot truly be angry when satisfied due to anger sprouting almost directly from dissatisfaction with something. And, since anger is not satisfying (though a number of psychologists have spent a great many years debating whether or not having just finished being angry is satisfying), it seldom does anything to resolve the dissatisfaction that caused it in the first place.

The Demon Ghoul pondered the satisfied feeling. It poked and prodded it. It decided that it didn't really like it, and then became angry about that, thus effectively snuffing the satisfied feeling from existence as one would snuff out a fly with a swatter.


	12. An Excess of Etiquette

In combat, there isn't a great deal of difference between a wild caught slug and a domestic bred one. The only notable difference is that, due to needing quick wits to survive, wild caught slugs tend to learn faster than domestic ones when it comes to learning new moves, but the domestic slugs make up for it by being more willing and obedient than wild slugs. Once a fair amount of time has been spent teaching the slugs and learning their quirks, these subtle differences are virtually irrelevant.

But while domestic slugs are generally content to remain in corrals or shells when not in use, wild ones have a tendency to get bored and go off exploring. Some slingers break them of this, others choose to just teach them to come back to a whistle. Raph hadn't done either of these things, but then he wasn't a slugslinger of any kind. When his slugs wandered off, he just waited for them to come back.

They invariably did so, though Diego was at the start much less inclined to return in a timely manner than Friender. He also tended to wander a great deal farther than the Fandango. This is not to say that he went looking for trouble, only that if trouble was about, it was more likely to find Diego than Friender. And, naturally, trouble eventually did just that.

It happened during one of the frequent rest periods Raph's injured leg forced upon the journey. While he was reclining against a rock in an attempt to cajole his leg into not throbbing quite so much, he was jolted into a firmly upright position by a not terribly distant sound of distress.

Being very aware of his environment at all times, Raph judged not only that Diego was the slug not currently with him, but that it was Diego that was emitting the distressed squeal. He measured distance and direction without benefit of actual thought and lunged at once towards it, bounding up onto large rocks, seeking higher ground as a means of advantage.

A particularly long leap brought him to a reasonably high vantage point upon a large boulder, and he found himself looking down into a dusty clearing and seeing what looked like a large bulldog, which had a head that looked very much like PAC-Man would if his mouth had been full of sharp teeth and copious amounts of drool. It was, of course, a Slughound.

Not that Raph noticed, but it had a harness on which marked it as a trained one, meaning that it was merely capturing the slug and had no actual intention of eating it.

It had Diego pinned under one of its large, sharply clawed forepaws, and that Raph _did_ notice.

"Hey!" Raph demanded in what he judged to be as courteous a tone as could reasonably be expected of him under the circumstances, "Let go of my slug!"

"Grrr-rawr-grrr," explained the Slughound.

"I mean it!" Raph emphasized this point by pulling out his twin sais and brandishing them politely.

"Grrr-ruff-grwlr," protested the Slughound.

"Your slug!?" it was not Raph who yelled this, but it was still within the bounds of etiquette, "My hound just caught that slug. How can you say it's yours!?"

"I had it... him... it," Raph shook his head in a frenzy of word confusion, "That slug came to me, and if you wanna take it, you gotta fight me for it," he flipped a sai in a show of refined menace.

The person whom he was addressing decided to step out from behind the rock which had been concealing them rather rudely. The person, a weightlifter by physique and ego-maniacal meat-head by first impression, waggled an excessively augmented blaster rifle at Raph in a display of gross and really very ferocious cordiality.

"That's a Lavalynx," he shouted up at Raph, "And slugs like that one fetch a pretty fair price from Dr. Blakk. There's a war on, you know."

"I don't know anything!" Raph shouted, considered this sentence and decided to amend it, "I haven't heard of Dr. Blakk, but he sounds like someone who needs to be punched. _Hard_. In the face."

"Probably true," the meaty man nodded, "But that's not my bone to pick. All I want is the slug, and the gold it'll fetch once I've sold it. I want to upgrade my Mecha, you see."

Raph didn't see at all, and told the man so.

"Look here," the man said as courteously as Raph had earlier demanded, "I've got no quarrel with you, all I want is the slug. Since you're not a Shane, it shouldn't make much difference to you whether you have this Lavalynx or another. I don't know how you found it, and I don't especially care. But you can obviously acquire them more easily than I. And, if your blaster is any indication, you have very little interest in the finer things in life anyway, so you don't have any need of money. Since you apparently don't know about Dr. Blakk, you also don't really need a battle slug, which this one is. Which means that, by virtue of wanting it the most, I shall have it."

Raph affably told the man just where he could stuff it, and leaped down from the boulder, intent on showing the man as well as telling him.

The man with deliberate, measured politeness, loaded up a slug and shot him with it.

Being in midair at the time, Raph couldn't dodge the shot, but he did fold neatly into his shell and twist around so that he was showing his back to the oncoming slug, which transformed and really hit him one. It was a Rammstone, but not a terribly well trained one.

After slamming into Raph and sending him spinning, it also smashed headlong into the boulder from which he had jumped, shattering it and sending sprays of large rock chunks in all directions.

The man was obliged to move out of the way. The Slughound, with a yelp of fear, tried to lunge clear of the rocks, but one hit it squarely on the head and the unfortunate hound toppled over on its side and was then buried under several hundred more rocks of varying sizes and dispositions.

Raph peered out of his shell at the wreckage. He deemed it safe to come out. Very cautiously, he came out of his shell and looked about for his attacker. What he saw was Diego, wiggling up out of the rocks and hopping towards him over the rubble, apparently unharmed.

The man who had caused all of this stepped out from behind the boulder where he'd been cowering.

"My hound!" he wailed, "You've killed my hound!"

"It ain't dead," Raph said, noticing that the animal was already clawing its way out of the rocks.

"You'll pay for that!" the man shouted without taking any notice of his hound.

He started to load his blaster, but Raph beat him to it.

Using the same methodical politeness with which the man had earlier shot him, Raph loaded Diego into his pilfered blaster and, with either a sense of justice or vengeance, amiably fired the Lavalynx at the man who had just attempted to kill him and sell his slug to what amounted to The Devil.

His aim wasn't very good seeing as he'd never used a blaster to shoot a slug before, and he was unprepared for the jolt of the firing mechanism, which knocked him back, whereupon he tripped on a rock and fell on his shell, where he sprawled neither rudely nor politely. It was a neutral sort of sprawl, the kind that you just can't do in a shopping center, but which will not offend your friends should they see you doing it.

Diego, having no interest in any consideration of society, flung himself with near vicious, absolutely frenetic and utterly disastrous glee at the man who had been planning to (indirectly) ghoul him for the sole purpose of upgrading an already absurdly well outfitted Mecha Beast. Diego spat lava with wild abandon. He spat it with domestic restraint. He spat it with obtuse disregard for health codes and safety restrictions. He also, as it happened, completely missed his target.

He then popped out of velocity, plopped to the ground and proceeded to flollop about (which is only real in certain science fiction novels, which means that it was utterly impossible for him as he wasn't a part of any such novels, and therefore he must have been only doing something very much like flolloping).

The man looked around at the raining destruction and decided to retreat before things got any messier. His hound, whining pitifully, raced to follow his rapidly receding form.

Raph sat up and looked about. He decided he didn't like what he saw and lay back down again.

Diego continued to move about in a thoroughly impossible manner.

Friender decided that he ought to be doing something and began to sing a little ditty in the manner of a cricket (that is, insistently without tune). This attracted the attention of the Rammstone, whose master had abandoned it. Being as it had never liked him very much, it declined to follow him. Instead, it hopped over to Friender to try and slap him into singing at least slightly less off-key.

Raph sat up again, and noticed the Rammstone.

"Hey there, Bullet," Raph said, held out a hand, and smiled a friendly smile when the slug hopped aboard, "Meet the other guys," he lowered his hand so that Friender could also hop onto it.

Bullet was a domesticated slug, and that was why he had come to Raph instead of wandering off on his own. He found the wilderness to be an awful place, and he hoped fervently that Raph would decide to leave it for somewhere much more civilized. He also hoped that Raph would make sure he was properly awake before firing him at anything, something his previous master never did.

When Diego was finished doing the patently impossible, he settled down and simply returned to doing the improbable (that is, coming to Raph without being called or in fact being trained to return at all). He decided that he'd had enough adventures for one day, and vowed to spend the rest of it sleeping instead of wandering about sending an open invitation for trouble to come and find him.

Having seen Bullet demolish a very large rock, and having observed Diego turning the unruly heap of shattered stone into a neatly composed pile of molten slag, Raph realized that what he lacked in mobility could now be made up for with sheer firepower. He'd have to work on his aim though.

He limped away from the ruins of the battlefield, much relieved that he hadn't been anywhere near a town, as that could have been utterly disastrous, what with the burning and collapsing of buildings, the running, screaming and bleeding of soon-to-be-corpses and all of the social rules that would have been bent, tortured, broken and then ripped to shreds in the making of those ruins.

Being the sort of turtle that he was, Raph actually felt quite energized by the battle and, buoyed by his somewhat unclear and indecisive victory, decided that he was ready to journey onward. Friender pointed him in the right direction, and he walked that way.

Friender then attempted to resume singing, but was knocked soundly on his head by Bullet, who either didn't appreciate music or else just wanted to appreciate it more quietly than Friender. Diego, true to his vow, went almost immediately to sleep, and there he remained for the rest of the day.

* * *

Though it is of no relevance, it should still be documented that Raph was not the only one to engage in an appalling travesty of social niceties.

As they prepared to exit The Flumes, Mikey made the mistake of pushing the button to restore his Mecha to beast form before actually getting out of the water, which resulted in it bucking, almost sinking and barely managing to scrabble onto the shore, knocking Leo off into the muddy water in the process.

When he dragged himself out of the filthy water, smelling slightly of dead fish, Leo politely introduced a slap to the back of Mikey's head as a tribute to what Raph would have done had he been there.

* * *

In the swamp where Don was, a medium sized fish leaped out of the water and bit his arm. He politely asked it to stop doing that. It querulously refused to do so, so he caught it, built a fire over which to cook it, and then, very politely indeed, proceeded to eat it as well.

* * *

The Demon Ghoul caught a few slugs and ate them, but it was in no way polite. Not only did it chew with its mouth open and gulp its food down, it did not excuse itself after an especially revolting burp.


	13. Band, Gang, Pack, Murder?

Leo, Mikey and the Shane Gang unknowingly repeated what Don had done the last time he entered the Blakk Industries facility, only with less fumbling on account of Burpy's lighting his head on fire to provide illumination until someone could find a light switch. Seeing the room with all of its gore and other disgusting substances, they thought it might have been better if they hadn't had the benefit of illumination of any sort. But they had and they had already seen so it didn't matter anymore.

"What... happened here?" Trixie wondered aloud, started to swipe a finger across a trail of slime on a table, decided it would be unsanitary and so didn't.

"Some kind of... battle," Leo suggested, "I think."

"I've never seen anything like it," Kord said, looking mostly at the unsanitary slime, "What sort of slug could do this?" it never occurred to him that there might not have been any slug at all, because nearly everything that happened in Slugterra had to do with slugs.

"Whatever it was, it was really powerful," Eli commented, looking at the twisted bars of what had been a ghoul containing unit, "Look at all the things it destroyed."

There was no denying it, looking at all the things which had been destroyed would take far longer than any of them wanted to contemplate, because practically everything had been destroyed.

Mikey nearly tramped on a pile of ashes, but Leo caught him, instinctive horror thrilling through him. Mikey looked as though he would protest, but Leo shook his head wordlessly. There was something about those ashes. Something... terribly awful. Leo didn't know what it was, but he did know that it was never appropriate to step in anything that was terribly awful.

"This must have been some kind of... ghouling facility," Trixie ventured, "Looks like they had an accident. What do you think they might have been doing that caused it?" she looked at Eli.

"A _what_ facility?" Leo interrupted before Eli had fully opened his mouth to reply.

"We already explained ghouls to you, remember?" Trixie was impatient with the interruption.

"I remember, but... a ghouling facility? That sounds so... so... wrong."

"That's because it _is_ ," Eli said.

"Uh... Leo?" Mikey said in the hesitant kind of voice he used when he had found something truly upsetting and was hoping that, by drawing attention to it, the nightmarish qualities of it might be dispersed.

Leo looked over towards Mikey, who stood holding in his hands an empty mutagen container, and utterly failed to disperse the nightmarish qualities of it. It had been broken, its contents were nowhere to be seen, which meant they were probably inside something... or _someone_. Mikey might not have been the swiftest turtle in Slugterra, but even he could see that combining Dark Water with mutagen was bound to be very bad. Leo swallowed audibly.

"Mutagen?" Eli guessed.

"The container for it," Leo clarified with a helpless nod.

"Oh good," Pronto said, "If it is not here, then perhaps it is somewhere else, causing harm to no one."

"The only problem with that theory," Eli said slowly, "is that it _used_ to be here. Someone... or something... took it. And by 'took', I mean drank it or wallowed in it or whatever you do with mutagen."

Leo considered this. He'd seen it both ways, and he vaguely wondered if it might produce a different result depending on how contamination occurred. He decided to store that thought for when he found Don, so that an actual genius could work on that or else tell him it was stupid to even consider it.

"This isn't good, Eli," Kord said, having stumbled into another bit of bad news.

He gestured towards a bunch of shattered ghoul shells. Eli looked at the broken shells, grappled and then wrestled with trying to understand the implications, and then managed to pin those implications to the ground and interrogate them.

"If Blakk Industries pulled out, why didn't they take their ghouls with them?" Trixie asked aloud, but Eli had come up with a far more terrifying question.

"If Blakk Industries left the slugs behind... who or what broke them out?"

The two most easily distracted members of the group had each wandered off in entirely different directions. Nobody noticed Pronto slipping out to follow the trail of slime, and nobody noticed Mikey discovering a staircase and deciding to climb up it. What they did hear was a high-pitched shriek coming from above, and an even higher one entering in from outside through the open space where a door certainly should have been but most clearly was not.

Mikey came crashing down the stairs, a lunging wave of ghouls coming down after him. Pronto sprinted in through the doorway, with a line of ghouls in tow. Mikey and Pronto ran right past each other, and each encountered the others' entourage and immediately turned around again. In sudden panic, they leaped into each others arms and landed in an ungainly tangle of limbs on the floor.

The ghouls came pouring in, shrieking, snarling, leaping and biting.

Leo unsheathed his katana but, knowing that these were innocent slugs who had been warped by a cruel mind, Leo's hero heart quailed at the prospect of fighting them. He backed up uncertainly, found slugs in the direction he was backing, backed up in a new direction, and discovered a wall there.

"What do we do?" Leo asked desperately, "I don't want to hurt them."

"Try to lure them all into one place," Eli shouted over the slavering, snarling din, "I have an idea."

He hopped over a line of ghouls and headed for the stairs down which some portion of the horde had just come. He was stopped short by a second wave of ghouls, this one carrying what looked like a slingshot made out of several Barretos tied together.

Eli hopped back a few steps as, giggling in a most unsettling manner, a ghoul loaded itself into the slingshot, several ghouls pulled it back, and then let it fly. Eli flattened himself against the stair railing as the Pyringo blasted past him and, reaching velocity, began to apply fire to things that would really prefer if it didn't do that, especially things that had never done anything to deserve this.

Trixie yelled out in surprise as the Pyringo flamed over her head, ducked, rolled and looked around wildly for the shooter she was sure had to be here somewhere. But then she saw the slingshot and her eyes widened with fear. It wasn't the fact that the ghouls could reach velocity that was so frightening, though that was bad enough. The really bad thing, to her mind, was seeing ghouls working together.

Though they tended to form packs when they escaped their masters, these packs were generally all of a single kind and not terribly cooperative, certainly nothing like ordinary slugs (and especially unlike extraordinary ones such as Eli had). These were intelligent ghouls. Cooperative ghouls. That was bad.

"I've never seen ghouls do that before," Kord said, "I didn't even know they _could_ do that."

"Fear not!" Pronto announced, hefting his blaster, "Pronto the Brave shall vanquish the threat!"

He leaped out of hiding and propelled himself across the floor, yelling a fierce battle cry while firing his Flatulorhinkus at the living slingshot. The slingshot got off another shot, which Pronto's slug intercepted and dispatched. But as the stink cloud settled, it was obvious that the slingshot itself remained unharmed. The ghouls had just sacrificed one of their number to protect the whole.

"This isn't right!" Trixie cried as Pronto beat a hasty retreat, "Ghouls don't behave like this!"

"They do now!" Leo snarled at her, blocking spikes from a fired Greneater with his katana, "So stop saying they don't and _adapt_!"

His eyes seemed to flash as he sheathed one katana, pulled out his blaster, deftly one handed a slug shell into it, and fired. Cappy the Tazerling threw electricity at ghouls for all he was worth, but a Grimmstone knocked him from the air before he reached the slingshot.

Through the writhing ghouls, fired slugs and fired ghouls, Leo saw that a landing about a hundred feet away had become infested with Barretos, who were assembling themselves into a second slingshot.

"Mikey!" Leo yelled, then pointed with his katana, "Stop them!"

"On it!" Mikey lunged from his place of cover, flipped and rolled until he was standing at the base of the stairs that led up to the landing and pulled out a slug, "Good luck, Skip."

Skip the Hop Rock went at his work with a will. So much will that he utterly destroyed the entire landing upon which the Barretos had been assembling. Ghouls flew in multiple directions. Being tough little critters, they were mostly unhurt, except for maybe their pride.

Mikey was already heading towards where Skip was going to land before the slug shifted into his usual form and caught him before Skip landed in a mass of ghouls that had gathered like hungry hyenas underneath a tree where a leopard has stashed a gazelle.

"There's too many!" Kord shouted, "We'll never beat 'em all."

In spite of Mikey's success, a second slingshot was erected alongside the first, and more ghouls heaved through the air on their deadly missions of destruction. And more ghouls were still pouring in from other rooms. The Shane Gang had never seen so many in one place. None of them had admitted it to themselves, but it was a sure bet that not all of these had come from this facility. There were too many.

"We don't have to win," Leo said to anyone who would listen, "Eli said we just need to get them together. Don't focus so much on taking them out, focus on getting them to bunch together!"

"Easy for you to say," Kord muttered, but did as he was told.

If the truth is any consideration at all by this point, it must be clearly stated that it was not at all easy for Leo to say. Switching between firing his blaster, blocking attacks with his katana and dodging about trying to retrieve his slugs before the ghouls hurt them left him quite out of breath, and it really isn't clear where he found enough of it to spare on telling people what to do.

Some have theorized that heroes have an extra burst of breath and energy stored somewhere inside them that they can access in just this type of situation. Others have declared that to be complete nonsense as well as being unscientific, and refuse to discuss the matter further.

Eli, meanwhile, had finally successfully climbed up the stairs. Getting up on the railing, he managed by way of stretching himself much more than is recommended by any yoga book to reach a metal crossbeam support and then stood on it. The fact that he could do this is a testament to the poor construction of the building, as this sort of reckless stunt would be fully impossible in any building that met the safety requirements of Slugterran facilities.

Eli then managed to leap the not inconsiderable distance between this beam and a chandelier on the ceiling which looked rather shockingly like some kind of hideous trophy that had been hung upside down. He stood on that too, thereby proving that this building failed to meet yet another safety requirement, and then he began to yell at the people on the ground.

He told them not to worry, that everything was under control and would shortly be fine. They all dutifully ignored him, primarily because they couldn't hear him over the racket they were making.

"You ready, Doc?" Eli asked, sliding the shell occupied by his Boon Doc into his blaster.

Doc snuggled into a comfortable position to be fired from at a hundred miles an hour, which he shortly was. Why, exactly, Eli needed height to perform this particular shot is not the kind of question you should ask of a person who is firing a slug from a blaster while standing on an ugly chandelier.

In any case, Doc went flying across the room. He wheeled about, swung through the air on a non-existent trapeze, spun until he was dizzy, and then exploded with the light of health, which fell down upon the horrified ghouls, who were shortly much less horrified and not ghouls at all.

Then, quite thoroughly exhausted, Doc fell out of the air and into the hands of Leo, who had been waiting patiently all this time to catch him, somehow sensing that he would appreciate such a gesture.

"Good job, Doc!" Eli shouted.

On account of the fact that the slugs had ceased being fired and the ghouls had stopped being ghouls, it was now possible to hear Eli. Everyone looked up at him and wondered how he'd got there. They also wondered what sort of monster had designed the chandelier he was standing on.

"Now, uh," Eli cleared his throat in an embarrassed sort of way, "how do I get down?"

Mikey sighed as though he was constantly having to rescue other people and was really getting tired of it. He added a shake of his head because the sigh just didn't seem to be enough by itself.

"I'll get him," he said wearily, swinging his kusarigama.

* * *

Don had managed to leave the swamp behind and was now back on solid ground, as well as being in a cavern that he was utterly certain was, in fact, on the map that he had.

Deciding that this accomplishment deserved some manner of reward, he decided to find a place to pitch camp and sleep for a good eight hours or so.

His slugs were pleased with this arrangement, because it meant that they could now go off and forage. Don had brought food raided from the facility both for himself and for them, but Blakk Industries did not have the tastiest slug food available, and many of the slugs felt that they would rather chew on roots than eat that stuff (though the less successful foragers quickly proved this feeling to be an utterly false one -as so many feelings are- by consuming a respectable amount of slug food that evening).

It was also obvious that Don was toting more slugs than he could reasonably be expected to feed for any length of time. This wasn't his doing of course, it was just that the slugs had insisted on following him wherever he went and so now he was stuck with them whether he wanted them or not.

He hadn't gotten around to naming any of them, largely because he had been carefully trained not to bother with naming anything because Mikey would immediately want to name it something else entirely and he was frankly so annoying about it that trying to fight him just wasn't worth the arguably non-existent extra burst of energy and breath that heroes might or might not possess to argue.

However, though he had not intentionally named any of the slugs, he'd begun (very much against his will) to think of one of the Flaringos as "Leader", because that particular slug seemed to have all the organizational skills, if not all the brains as well.

* * *

As he went deeper and deeper into Slugterra, the Raph began to have the strange feeling that he was being followed. There was nothing in sight, yet his senses told him there was something back there. Something evil.

Evil it was, for it was the Demon Ghoul.

Though it was still distant, some sense told him that it there. Whether this was a sixth sense of turtles or ninja is at best unclear and hardly important. All that really counts is that Raph had become aware of a hulking, shadowy menace that was tracking him.

In the manner of one who does most of his talking with his fists and therefore cannot convince any psychiatrist to see him in order to deal with his mental and emotional instabilities, Raph decided to stop making forward progress and to lie in wait for the haunting menace, so as to meet it on his terms (inasmuch as that was possible given the circumstances) rather than its terms.

He didn't know it, but he would have a bit of a wait, for the Demon Ghoul had just discovered its own reflection in a clear pool and so hated what it saw that it resolved to dirty up the water until it couldn't see itself anymore. It also resolved to do this to any other water it came across so that it wouldn't have to look upon its hideous visage ever again.

This strategy was obviously flawed, but nobody would have dared to argue with it.


	14. Caverns of Sadness

"No," Donatello explained and then, finding that he couldn't think of any suitable words to go with it, he decided that he ought to at least repeat if he hoped to clear up any confusion surrounding the issue, "No."

Seeing that nobody seemed to have heard him, he decided that maybe he ought to shout it. As this seemed unable to properly convey his true feelings about it, he tried to improve it by adding a universal expletive on as a prefix to the original explanation. It didn't help at all.

The problem was this: He wasn't actually explaining anything to anyone because there was nobody there to explain it to, nor indeed anything present to be explained. This could account for why he couldn't seem to think of any other words to put with the one he'd got, which certainly wasn't going to help him win at scrabble. It also wouldn't impress any of those writers who publish books about setting boundaries and making sure other people don't take improper advantage of you, because he wasn't saying 'No' fiercely enough to stop the thing he was saying No to from doing what it was doing (which was, chiefly speaking, not being present).

The thing that was obstinately absent from the situation was the device the Kraang had been mucking about with that Don assumed had something to do with how he had come to be transported to this wretched hive of scum and villainy (Remember: the only people he had actually met here had first attacked him, then imprisoned him, and finally set loose a hell-beast by way of ignoring his warnings; unless you count the fish he ate as a person, in which case those people had also tried to bite him).

Don had spent the better part of two days marching from one cavern to another, steadfastly refusing to enjoy the scenery or anything else he happened to cross paths with (which was nothing, because he avoided obvious paths where possible), and finally he had arrived at the cavern he wanted (it had taken so long because he had fallen down the shaft, which meant he'd had to go a lot farther just to get back to where he'd started than he'd had to in order to get away from it in the first place) and found to his intense chagrin... nothing. Precisely and exactly nothing.

Because the spot was rather exposed, Don had left his Mecha, trailer and most of the slugs in a nearby canyon, taking only a handful of them and his blaster. As he had already explained the situation to them, they felt no need to listen to him explain it again to the nobody he was explaining it to.

He made one last, desperate attempt to explain his feelings on the subject.

"No!" he shouted.

And then he gave up and wondered if maybe it was alright for boys to cry after all, in spite of all that had been written on the subject and also told to every boy by every other boy he ever met and very often his father as well. He decided that all the boys and fathers could stick it in their ear and cried.

Somehow, without ever firing a shot or at least having been killed, he had been utterly, totally, completely, fully, thoroughly... well, you get the picture... defeated.

He had nothing else. His every hope had ridden on this one thing, the only thing, that could get him back home. And now it was gone. Taken? Destroyed? Did it even matter at this point?

There were 99 Caverns. It would take an entire lifetime to explore all of them thoroughly enough to be assured that the thing he was looking for was not in any of them. He was already fifteen, and therefore a certain percentage of his lifetime had already come and gone, making it fully impossible to ever search all of the caverns, unless by some stroke of magic he became immortal.

His dreams hadn't really been very big. Nothing to get too excited over. All he wanted in the world was to save New York from the criminal element that infested it and to get a very wonderful and extremely pretty girl to fall in love with him. Those dreams weren't all that special. But for all that they were _his_.

And now... now they were gone.

"No?" he inquired of a nearby rock face, but it merely glowered at him in a way that suggested it thought that he should just move along because there wasn't anything to see here.

Leader clambered up out of his shell and made his way onto Don's shoulder. With a small appendage he patted the side of Don's face, then leaned against Don's head. Leader was a very simple creature, and didn't know anything about New York, saving the world, or pretty girls. But he did know that the turtle which had saved him from a life of torment (or a death by way of being eaten), was in a severe sort of mental distress, the likes of which you most often see behind glass in rooms with padded walls.

"Coo," Leader explained, "Eeeh. Eeh. Mmm... coo."

These were not real words, even to a slug, but they were the sort of thing that slugs said when they encountered immeasurable sadness and wanted to diminish it so that it could be properly measured just like everything else, but didn't know how to do that. They didn't help.

Don was still very alone. The hive was no less full villainy, nor was their any discernible change in the level of its wretchedness. The object which should have been there stubbornly persisted in not being there. The dreams, such as they were, still lay shattered on the floor of Don's mind.

The broom of Don's mind was trying to sweep them up, but really wasn't very enthusiastic about it and kept pausing in its work to wonder if there was really a point to any of this. It finally decided there wasn't and evaporated into a cloud of apathy. The dreams stayed on the floor where they belonged, while the apathetic broom cloud drifted about where it didn't belong.

"Coo," Leader repeated, and added a reassuring chirp for good measure.

It didn't do anybody any good, least of all the broom.

* * *

"No," Eli didn't so much use this as an explanation as the sort of thing one says just before passing out from lack of oxygen to the brain as the result of it having been entirely knocked from one's lungs by a sight so horrifying that in the future one's nightmares would have nightmares about it.

Trixie was considerably less articulate, and only managed the squeaky beginnings of a scream which was cut off by the same thing that had caused Eli to speak as he had. Kord managed to say even less, by virtue of his having exhaled just before seeing the sight which would have robbed him of oxygen if only he'd had any. Leo and Mikey said nothing at all.

What they were looking at was a town. Or rather, the charred remains of what had been a town.

Back at the abandoned ghouling facility, after they had cured the slugs and Eli had disembarked from the chandelier, Pronto had told them about the slime trail he'd been following when the ghouls accosted his person. He used more words than necessary, but most storytellers do.

His audience managed to get the gist of it anyway.

Being the tracker that he was (or thought he was, it was never really clear), Pronto said that the trail was almost certainly made by the beast which must have been produced when the person, slug or other entity came in contact with the mutagen. Eli and Leo were both adamant that it must be followed, immediately if not sooner. There was no time to waste, they set off at once (which is as near to immediately as makes no difference, so they were satisfied that it was soon enough).

And then they proceeded to meander in hopeless circles because the thing they were tracking did not appear to go much of anywhere in a straight line. Along the way, they couldn't help but notice the conspicuous lack of slugs in the areas they visited, or the fact that they were occasionally set upon by ghoul packs that -while every bit as coordinated as the ones at the facility- were in fairly small numbers and were thus reasonably easy to disable and cure whenever Doc was up to it.

At last they had come to what had been a town. But the buildings were burned. There were few people, and fewer slugs. Most of the survivors huddled in groups, weeping and babbling incoherently about someone they knew who had been eaten by "The Demon Ghoul" (as ghouls could really only ever be called ghouls, so too was it fully impossible to call the Demon Ghoul by any other name; though the fact is that nobody would ever want to call it at all).

There was nothing The Shane Gang or turtles could do for these people. Doc was exhausted and couldn't heal their hurts, most especially the mental and emotional anguish. The people couldn't say anything useful, describing the Demon Ghoul only as huge, monstrous, with evil glowing eyes and fire spewing out of its mouth and burning everything and almost everyone to the ground.

In silence, they moved on.

Though there are 99 Caverns, that doesn't mean that there are only 99 towns. Many of the larger caverns had multiple towns, and this one was no exception. The strange thing was that the next town down the road was completely untouched, while the one after that lay in ruins.

While the Shane Gang were hit by shock and horror to such a degree that thinking about anything other than finding and stopping the Demon Ghoul was impossible, Leo was able to be more objective.

The Demon Ghoul had no need to hide, and thus no reason to avoid the road. Since the road was the easiest way to travel, it had even less reason to avoid it. And yet, that surely must be what it had done, otherwise why wouldn't it have destroyed every town it came across? There was no reason to suspect one town was any less offensive to it than another.

The only reason it would be progressing in the manner it obviously had been was if it was following someone who was avoiding the towns. Someone who knew how to move unseen. Someone who didn't know the layout of the caverns, and so could only judge the best route by looking. Leo knew it was a long shot, but he was suddenly completely certain that the Demon Ghoul was following one of his brothers. Since Don had been closest to the Kraang (and thus the mutagen) when whatever happened occurred, it seemed likely that he was the one being pursued.

Leo didn't say any of this aloud. It was too far-fetched to get anyone's hopes up. Or, if we're being honest, to get Mikey's hopes up. Leo wasn't sure whether to be hopeful that he was right, or that he was wrong. Each had its own pros and cons.

This theory seemed to be very much in error when the slime trail eventually meandered back to the cavern where it had started, then wound its way towards a different exit.

It was at this moment that Mikey decided to do one of his infamous left turns when a right turn is warranted, and promptly walked both himself and Leo -riding atop their Mecha Beast- into a hole.

"Are you guys okay?" Eli yelled down the shaft.

"We're good!" Leo shouted back up it, though he wasn't actually sure that was true because his body hadn't had time to process all the things it had bounced off of, much less assign blame to certain regions for the pain that seemed to be flitting in and out like an indecisive moth in a doorway.

"Want us to come down?"

"Uh... no, I don't think so. Can you get us back up?"

"Well no. That's why I suggested we come to you," Eli replied.

Leo put this in the queue of things for his mind to look into, but it was presently trying to decide whether or not he had actually sprained his right elbow and couldn't be bothered.

"Uh... Leo?" Mikey was using that voice again.

Reluctantly, Leo looked over at where Mikey had landed on his back. Mikey was still on his back, but he was holding something in his hand that he'd picked up off the ground. It was a shuriken. Not just any shuriken though. The turtles made their own shurikens, each in his own unique style. Though essentially all the same, there were subtle differences that allowed each turtle to readily identify his own shurikens from those of his brothers.

It was Don's, and it didn't appear to have been used for anything, merely lost.

"You suppose D turned right when he should have gone left?" Mikey wondered.

"You turned left when you should have been turning right," Leo reminded him, "But yes, I think Donnie wound up down here," he paused momentarily to consider his previous sentence, and decided it wasn't worth correcting, "Which means... well, I don't actually know what it means."

His mind decided it was just a bruise he'd gotten after all, and decided that it was time to think of something else for awhile, to sort of relax and get back into the swing of things, return to the problem of injury identification later when it had had a nice rest.

"Hey guys!" Leo called up to the Shane Gang, "We think one of our brothers might be down here. We're going to look for him. You guys keep following the Demon Ghoul!"

"Okay," Eli sounded reluctant, "When you get done, your Mecha has a map feature built into it. Remember though, the maps don't have everything on them, there will be passages that won't show on your map which may or may not be shortcuts. Be careful."

"Dude!" Mikey shouted up the shaft, "We're always careful!"

"That's what I'm afraid of," Eli said, but not loudly enough to be heard down the hole.

* * *

Raph didn't attempt to explain anything to anyone.

In one savage moment, all reason had been stripped from him and all he could do was narrow his eyes, growl and launch himself bodily at the thing that had done the stripping.

The Demon Ghoul was a truly maddening sight, but that wasn't what had made Raph so angry. What had so deeply inflamed the powerful anger on which he typically ran was the sight of what the thing had on one of its stupidly long tail spikes.

A Bo Staff. Not just any Bo Staff. The one belonging to Raph's brother, Don.

The Demon Ghoul brushed Raph back with a dismissive wave of its paw, missing him with its claws only because he twisted in the air, flipped over and managed a perfectly movie ready three-point landing, still snarling inarticulately at the Demon Ghoul.

For a moment, Raph's eyes blazed with a hatred that conveyed a passionate loathing for absolutely everything in the known universe. The hatred quickly realized that it had spread itself much too thin and decided to converge upon a single point in time and space. Now and roughly fifty feet from here, which was where the Demon Ghoul was slouching in a carelessly spiteful way.

The Demon Ghoul was much more articulate in its growling. Its eyes blazed, and its hatred was much more thickly spread over everything in the known universe, most particularly anything that it could see, which included the turtle fifty feet in front of it.

Raph's mind scrambled itself, attempting to locate his vocabulary in a desperate bid to retrieve his reasonable side from the deep black pit into which it had flung itself on seeing the Demon Ghoul's souvenir. But it could only find one word, and that only made the fury which was rapidly building a cover for the pit with bricks that much stronger. Strong enough that Raph took action.

 _Kill._

It wasn't a very useful word, and not one Raph often used, even in scrabble. But, for the moment, it was the only one he had, and he already knew exactly how to apply it. Lunging thoughtlessly for the Demon Ghoul's head, he attempted to apply it to the creature's brain via his sai, but it brushed him back like he was an irritating fly. It then attempted to crush him as if he was an irritating fly. Like an irritating fly, he dodged just as the blow hit where he'd been standing.

The Demon Ghoul threw back its head as though summoning the wrath of thunder and lightning. Then, evidently remembering that it was not the God of Thunder, it turned its head down to look sharply at Raph, crouching just beyond easy reach.

It opened its mouth. A flap on the roof of its mouth opened, effectively closing off its throat and opening up a different passage along the same lines. It huffed in the way a dragon would when blowing fire at an errant night. Only it didn't spit flames. Rather, it spewed ghouls.

A volley of shrieking, flailing ghouls winging their way absurdly through the air is a truly terrible sight. To see them exiting the cavernous maw of a Demon Ghoul is worse. And to witness them reaching velocity and spinning into larger, more deadly beasts is the absolute worst. Just the worst.

Raph growled at the onslaught, and prepared to meet Fate, kick Fate in the teeth and stomp up and down on Fate's head.

Raph simply had no respect for the inevitable.


	15. Platforming

"I don't feel good about this, Eli," Trixie admitted, "We shouldn't leave those guys alone."

"They know how to take care of themselves," Eli assured her.

Trixie didn't use her words to respond to this, merely flashing him a look that said she wasn't at all assured by his assurances. With another glance she added that the turtles knew next to nothing about Slugterra and who knew what kind of things they might run into down there in the cavern Pronto had said was a swamp? A subtly lifting eyebrow elaborated that one of the turtles had caused them to fall down the hole in the first place and probably shouldn't be trusted with such fragile things as his own safety. The other eyebrow continued this line by suggesting that his safety ought to be kept on the tallest shelf in a locked bomb shelter at the bottom of the nearest ocean just to make very sure that he never got his hands on it, and then someone should probably swallow the key just to be extra secure about it.

"They're ninjas," Eli shrugged, his shoulders saying nothing useful, "And besides, they're armed. Leo's got a good variety of slugs, and knows how to use them," he refused to say ' _I hope'_ out loud, even though that's precisely what he was thinking, and also what his shrugging shoulders were communicating to Trixie's by now thoroughly lively eyebrows.

"I believe that our quarry has doubled back," Pronto interrupted, "In an attempt to cover its trail."

"That... seems unlikely," Eli said dubiously, "First, how would it even know we were following it? Second, why would it care? I don't get the impression that it wants to avoid drawing attention to itself."

"Pronto does not need to explain vague trivialities at this time. Pronto merely knows that our Demon Ghoul has gone this way. Come, follow Pronto!"

* * *

Almost directly beneath the Shane Gang, Leo and Mikey had just motored their way across the greenish, brackish, sludgy water, only to find themselves caught in a short, slow, highly improbable waterfall. They tumbled down it, managed to land upright on their aquatic mode equipped Mecha, went around a bend in the swampy river and went back the way they'd come, only about fifteen feet lower down than before. An unpleasant looking rock jutted out from the wall and stuck itself across the water like a troll demanding to know what was tripping over his bridge.

Mikey and Leo were required by their height to hop off their makeshift boat, onto the rock and then back onto their boat before it motored away without them. Fortunately they had both played a fair number of video games and were good enough at them to get it right on the first try.

"So does that make this an escort mission?" Mikey asked, looking over his shoulder at Leo.

"Shut up," Leo suggested, amending this with, "Watch out for that branch!"

Rather than turn left or right to avoid it (probably a wise decision, considering how bad he was at making those sorts of choices), Mikey made the Mecha rear up, used the branch as a ramp and launched into the air, where they hung for an unspecified number of seconds before dropping roughly but relatively safely back onto the surface of the water, though they caused a splash which doused them, causing some chattered complaints to emanate from the shells their slugs inhabited.

With a little pail designed with slugs in mind, Cappy the Tazerling began to bail out his shell, chirping things that would probably translate into "Be careful!", "Just what do you think you're doing?" and "Please stop before someone dies because this is _not_ a video game and we will _not_ respawn if we get clubbed in the face by a floating insect ferrying a coin back and forth for no apparent reason."

They weaved and dodged their way around intermittent and thoroughly unlikely patches of land, took running jumps off of a number of convenient rocks and branches and floating mushroom caps, and generally enjoyed the experience far more than any sane person would. Being teenagers, and mutant ones at that, sanity had never been a major concern of theirs.

They found a sign of someone having been there recently on one of the land spots. A small pile of ashes from a fire with some fish bones sitting near it. Because the swamp hadn't already erased the evidence, they knew someone must have made a camp here recently. They hoped that someone was Donatello.

"Hurry, Mikey," Leo urged, though he wasn't sure what the rush was, it just felt like the thing to say.

"I'm floorin' it now, Leo," Mikey told him, though this was impossible because his Mecha did not, in fact, have a floor; the point stood nonetheless.

The only real reason for hurrying was to try and catch up with their objective before it decided to move again, as objectives are often apt to do in the most irritating levels of video games. If reality worked like video games (which it didn't), this was probably pointless, because those irritating levels always involve the objective magically teleporting to a new location when you get close to it, meaning that the only thing that hurrying does is make you miss the opportunity to pick up coins along the way and increase the probability of leaping off a cliff that doesn't need to be leaped off of.

Realizing this, Leo suggested that Mikey be careful. Mikey suggested that maybe Leo should stop being a back seat driver. Leo made the suggestion that Mikey watch where he was going, to which Mikey replied that if Leo was so worried about it, he should just come up front and drive himself. Because the physics of doing so while they were in motion were more insane than having a box of frogs on one's nightstand instead of an alarm clock, Leo suggested that maybe Mikey should shut up. Mikey then suggested Leo was being rude, to which Leo replied... well, if you've ever gone on a long road trip with your sibling and if, at any point, your parents threatened to leave the both of you by the side of the road and drive on without you... you know where the conversation went from there.

Cappy the Tazerling decided that someone needed to be the parent in this situation and, climbing out of his shell, proceeded to apply an electric jolt to Leo, then hopped onto Mikey and did the same to him.

Having gained their full attention, he gibbered at them and made some emphatic gestures that left no doubt about whether or not he would organize a revolt of the slugs to turn this tub around if the two of them didn't shape up. They tried to feign ignorance of what he was saying, at which point he jolted the both of them again, more soundly this time, and then hopped back into his shell and fumed quietly, daring them to start arguing again by darting angry looks in their general directions.

They piped down for all of ten minutes, then started the whole thing over again.

* * *

Raph thought that it was not so much pride that made him not want to retreat, as a certain lack of definition about the occupation (retreating, that is). When you ran towards something, you could usually look ahead and see that you were getting closer. You also could reasonably be expected to know when you'd got there. But when it came to running away, how were you to know when you were done?

In an infinite universe, there was no limit to how far away from something you could run, and there was no helpfully pointing arrow telling you where it was you were meant to stand once you had finished running away. You just had to take a wild guess about whether or not you'd run far enough.

This was naturally the sort of logic which, when explained to others, left them nodding in a way which was more sympathetic than agreeable, but Raph much preferred it to the alternative, because he'd heard that pride came before a fall, and falls of that sort were upsettingly similar to running away, in that you were never really sure you'd hit the bottom where toppled pride was concerned and so might keep on falling forever or at least perceive yourself to be doing that just for the sake of the exercise.

As it happened, Raph wasn't thinking just now, and so had no real objection to running away.

He was bleeding. He was bruised. He was badly battered. One of his slugs had very nearly been eaten, and another had been a bit chewed on. A steady rain of mind numbingly evil ghouls was hurtling through the air, reaching velocity, viciously attacking him, then falling down onto a pile of ghouls which had already done this.

Raph decided that his pride, definition and whatever else might normally prevent him from retreating could get bent, and crawled away in the same manner a wounded sea turtle would struggle towards the ocean if that same turtle had a seagull standing on it and pecking its head as it went. Slowly, painfully, but with grim determination, he crawled. The Demon Ghoul stood where it was and spat ghouls at him from its mouth as if it would never stop.

He didn't know where it had gotten this infinite supply of ammunition from, and he didn't ask. He only wished that it would get bored and go away, perhaps to shoot at someone else for awhile. But it didn't, and its range of fire was alarming.

Raph finally came to a narrow crevice between the ground he was crawling on and the rock wall he had been traveling beside, and wriggled into it. He crouched still for a moment, but found that the ghouls had followed him and, in an attempt to elude them, he moved into the utter blackness ahead.

The floor then rather unexpectedly dropped out from under him and he fell about five feet straight down into a tunnel which was dimly lit by luminous mushrooms sprouting from its craggy walls.

Even short as he was, it was fully impossible for Raph to stand up in the tunnel, and so he merely crawled along it, hoping it wouldn't narrow any further or, worse still, end entirely before reaching whatever daylight substitute for sun these caverns had.

The ghouls didn't pursue him, largely because they stopped moving forward when they realized they couldn't see. Only one dropped down into the luminescent tunnel below, and it was so abjectly terrified of the mushrooms and their strange light that it merely sat there and trembled.

Raph crawled up a little incline in the tunnel, then down another. He went straight for a long, long time, and then reached what at first seemed to be an impasse. Then he looked up and realized there was a ledge above him, and the ceiling was high enough for him to try standing up, which he did.

He didn't like the experience at all, and promptly sat down to catch his breath, which is one of the few things which is easier to nab if you remain motionless than it is if you actively chase it.

Friender, Diego and Bullet hopped out of the three shells he'd picked up along with the blaster, and went over to hug the mushrooms. Raph didn't know why they were doing this and, for the moment, he didn't especially care to find out. He didn't know that these particular mushrooms subsisted on slug energy or that their light had certain limited healing properties.

All he knew was that, while they were very pretty, he didn't especially want to try eating one.

Vaguely, he wondered if maybe this was where he had been going. Maybe he had been going to a place, rather than running from one. He decided that he was too tired and beat to think clearly and abandoned this line (and indeed any line) of thought altogether.

Then he passed out.

* * *

Donatello was inching his way along a perilously thin and crumbling ledge, a truly distressing number of feet above the cavern floor which was, from what he could see, alarmingly littered with sharply pointed stalagmites. They seemed to all be pointing at him, and probably laughing as well.

Strung out along the less perilous bits of ledge he had already traversed were the slugs who insisted on following him everywhere, chirping things which probably meant "you have saved our lives; we are eternally grateful" and he really wished at this point that they would stop doing that because he kept finding himself in dangerous places and didn't want them to get hurt as a result.

This particular disaster began when he decided that sitting around and sulking wasn't going to do anything for his dreams, so he got out an imaginary electric fan to blow away the cloud of apathy and got down to the business of continuing to be alive despite what the universe might have to say about it.

After getting up and wandering around aimlessly for a bit, he discovered tracks of a Mecha Beast left in the dirt. They passed right by where his device (or the Kraang's, depending upon how you looked at it) had been. There were also tracks of someone wearing boots leading to the exact spot where the device had been dropped, which then returned to the Mecha Beast tracks, which continued on their way as if nothing had happened. Donatello followed them, somewhat belatedly.

He had then followed them for quite awhile.

Eventually, he had lost them and looked up to see that the reason he had lost them was because they were mingling with so many others on account of the place they'd reached being the main street of a small town.

The people here were usually friendly. But word had traveled by way of the person on the Mecha Don had been tracking that some kind of monster was burning towns and, since they weren't sure what it looked like, they very happily set about attacking anything that didn't meet their standards for "normal". They greeted Don with pitchforks and burning torches, and he was forced to flee or else beat up a lot of people he really had no quarrel with.

The trouble with this strategy was that these people were very interested in making sure the people in the next town over didn't get killed. They all got on their Mechas and rode out of town after him. The next town over saw him coming, didn't like it at all and proceeded to do the same thing as the first town, forcing him to abandon the road entirely and flee in an completely new direction.

They had eventually pursued him into a canyon which inconveniently turned out to be a boxed one.

Unable to go backward or forward, Don had to make the swift decision about whether up or down were feasible alternatives. Seeing a number of foot and hand holds jutting out from the rock wall, Don saw that it would be possible for him to at least get beyond the range of any thrown pitchforks. Ideally, he hoped to get beyond the range of blasters as well.

He had climbed up as much as possible, but still found himself under fire with nowhere to hide. Seeing a ledge, he jumped onto that and began traveling sideways. Over time the ledge had narrowed. But at least the crowd of people couldn't follow him on account of being at the bottom of the box canyon and having no interest in rock climbing as a hobby much less an active pastime.

They stayed long enough to be sure he wasn't going to turn back, and then waited for him to go away altogether. He continued inching along the ledge, since the alternative was to stay where he was forever or else fall to his very certain death a truly distressing number of feet below.

He was just thinking that maybe this wasn't so bad, that being up high was really not that unusual for him and that he'd been in much more dangerous situations than this and survived when quite suddenly the ledge he was edging along wasn't.

* * *

 _ **Author's Note: Am I the only one who finds the one of the most annoying things about Pronto his intermittent use of third person when referring to himself? I dunno if that's just bad continuity on the part of the writers or if he's meant to be like that, but it's really hard to duplicate. It's also really hard to write in the voices of the characters when most of the story is done in the style this one is. Hopefully I didn't completely muff that. I feel like I probably did... oh well, too late now :P  
**_


	16. As Luck Would Have It

Don did not fall to his death. He did fall, but not in such a way as to be seriously hurt.

What happened was that two slugs came after him, literally diving off the ledge to reach him. At first he thought they'd just fallen off as well, but then he grasped which two it was and was suddenly struck so hard by a plan for survival that he was almost too stunned to implement it.

Shaking that off, he managed to grab onto his blaster while the slugs hopped into two shells and then he fired them in rapid succession at the ground.

The first was a Frostcrawler, who transformed and blew a reasonable facsimile of a ski slope made of ice into existence, which terminated in a very real upward sweep. The second was a Bubbaleone, which flew right past the slope, blew itself into a balloon and floated gently to rest near the ground.

Don hit the ice and slid down it on the back of his shell, his momentum carrying him up the sweep and allowing him to hang about up there for the critical fractions of a second it took to traverse the distance between the end of the sweep and the beginning of the inflated Bubbaleone.

He landed on this so hard that he bounced, and would have hit the ground rather hard had he not first come into contact with something which was by comparison rather soft. It let out a strangled yip.

"Oi! That's my slughound yer sittin' on!" Don looked up to see a face looming that looked strikingly like the cliff which had just thrown him down here and he wished to high heaven that it would take up looming someplace else, but it instead continued to speak at him, "Oh botheration! Not another one! Just how many of you lot are there, anyway? And I supposed this is your Frostcrawler too!"

Don blinked at him.

"Uh..." Don muttered intelligently.

"Er.." He added for the sake of interest.

"What?" He then decided that he'd said quite enough and waited for his obviously thoughtful and complex remarks to fully impress themselves upon the looming cliff-face that now appeared to be leering as well as looming, which did nothing at all to improve its lack of visual appeal.

"Here, take the stupid thing!" an arm like a slab of beef momentarily appeared in Don's vision, threw something at his chest and disappeared again, "I don't need this kind of trouble."

Don sat up, and the Frostcrawler rolled off his chest to land on the ground. Don looked at the thing he was sitting on, took pity on it, and stood up. He staggered a bit, his sense of balance was not yet convinced he was still alive and resented that he refused to lie down like any self respecting dead person ought to be doing circumstances being what they were.

"Hey, that's my transportation device," Don said, pointing at an object strapped to the side of the Mecha Beast which looked as though it could only belong to a cliff faced man and his meaty arms.

"I'm the one that bloody found it!" the man protested loudly, "I found it, I'm keeping it until I can find someone to buy the piece of junk... speaking of, you haven't got any money by chance do you?"

"I don't even know what it would look like if I had any," Don admitted.

A series of squeaks and thuds followed this statement. A pile of slugs appeared at the bottom of the ski slope, which was beginning to melt already. Don's entourage had followed him, and now sat in a disoriented and somewhat giddy pile. Leader sat up and waved in a way that suggested he'd become drunk before doing so, but it was really just the excessive glee that had him going wobbly.

"Would those be your slugs as well?" the man asked him.

"Well... no," Don said, then went on, "They don't belong to _anyone_. They're intelligent beings not luggage."

"Oh great, you're one of those...," the man rolled his eyes, "I suppose you'll fight me for them if I try to capture them, won't you? Well fine! You can have the stupid device," he swiped it from his Beast and threw it at Don's chest, "It's worthless anyway! Nobody knows what the bloody thing is so they don't even want it! Good show, now you have a pile of junk and some worthless slugs! Good day!"

He leaped onto his Mecha Beast and roared away, his hound following after him, casting baleful glances back as it went. Don watched them go, completely confused. But, slowly, by increments, something did activate in his brain.

"Did he say... 'not another one'?" Don asked, clutching the dimensional transport device to his chest as if it were a teddy bear and he a small child, "You don't suppose... no. It can't... it couldn't. Oh who am I kidding? Of _course_ it is!"

The realization he'd just come to utterly prevented him from experiencing any joy at having gotten the device he'd been after for so long. He'd just realized that at least one, if not more, of his brothers were here in Slugterra too.

He had to go back. He had to follow the trail in reverse until he found evidence of at least one of his brothers. If one was here, then they probably all were. He had to find them.

He had a vague idea about where to look. But he didn't have a Mecha Beast anymore, or a map. He was utterly, totally, completely lost and had no idea what direction back might lie in. Since the ground was rock, the man and his Mecha Beast had left no tracks to follow this time.

Don felt his legs turn to rubber and decided to just let it happen, collapsing into a heap on the ground, clutching the DTD as though it was the last ticket to a popular rock concert.

It might as well be just that, considering all the good it would do him to get it working now.

* * *

Raph woke up and found he was being bathed in what seemed to be ethereal light. He wasn't sure how he felt about this. On the one hand, it was very nice light. On the other, ethereal light often had to do with being dead or very nearly so anyway, and he didn't feel quite ready to meet his Maker.

For one thing, he hadn't yet worked out all the questions he'd like to ask his Maker with regards to just what his Maker had thought they were doing in making him a turtle, then seeing to it that he got dropped in some mutagen which would rend him from that relatively peaceable state of origin and put him instead into a state of perpetual irritation which came with a temper that certainly wasn't there when he was an ordinary turtle.

For another, he was lying on his back at the moment, and that was hardly a position one should meet their Maker in.

He decided to stop there.

If he still had these thoughts and concerns, he must not be truly dead, nor even mostly so.

He sat up, and decided that he was not even slightly dead, otherwise why would every part of him feel as if it had recently been hit by a sack of bricks and possibly an anvil as well?

He noticed the ledge above him. He noticed the tunnel behind him. He noticed the flowering mushrooms glowing on the walls and ceiling. He noticed Don's bo staff (which he had managed to secure before retreating) lying on the floor next to him. And he also noticed his slugs sleeping in a heap on the mushrooms.

He picked up the staff and returned his notice to the ledge, and considered how best to get up there. It was too high up to simply jump. And it looked maddeningly like it was just high enough that he couldn't quite reach it even if he held his hands over his head while jumping. He also realized that jumping was out of the question anyway, seeing as his leg felt like it was trying to kill him, beginning with his nerve endings and going from there. It was the same leg which had initially been bitten, and it had since been bitten a great many more times, and also more severely than the first time.

He regarded his slugs quietly. He decided that neither lava nor the violent smashing of indeterminate things was called for in this small space.

He had already discovered that Friender was not much use in a battle, though it had been the Fandango that distracted the ghouls enough for Raph to crawl away. Friender had been bitten as a result, but he was much better now that he'd snuggled healing mushrooms for awhile. He actually looked pretty well, all things considered.

Raph looked at the mushrooms. He looked at the ones on the walls. He looked at the ones on the ceiling. He looked at the ones on the floor. He saw that many of them were actually growing up off ledges of their own, rather than out sideways from the wall. He looked at these small ledges, and a thought came to him. He decided that it was a better thought than he'd had in awhile.

He got up, collected his slugs off their mushroom without waking them, and began to climb up the mushroom strewn ledges, working his way in a circle around the place and up to the desired ledge. A short, if painful, hop brought him onto it.

He stood up and looked about. Ahead was more tunnel, which went up and down in a most baffling manner. But, at the end of it, he could see what must certainly be waning daylight.

He went up and down the tunnel, and came out in a cavern which was unfamiliar to him (this could, of course, be said for almost any of the 99 Caverns). In the distance, he saw a figure which was quite familiar. Politely, he decided to avoid the figure, and went the other way, only to spot another (much more welcome) figure up ahead of him.

"Donnie!"

Don looked up at Raph out of slightly glazed eyes. Don didn't look well. He was clutching some piece of technology like it was a life preserver and he was a drowning man. He didn't at first react to the sight of Raph. But Raph, who had thought Don was dead, reacted enough for both of them.

Raph managed to run the distance between them while Don simply looked on, caught Don up in a hug and very nearly squeezed the life out of his brother, mumbling about how happy he was to see Don and other things that he typically didn't say out loud such as how much he loved and had missed him.

"I'm glad to see you too, Raph," Don managed to gasp, "Now... uh... could you put me down?"

Though Don was taller than Raph, Raph had nevertheless managed to pick him up off the ground.

Reluctantly, as if he was afraid doing so would shatter Don, Raph set him down. Then Raph coughed and tried to reclaim some sense of composure.

"You'll never believe what happened to me," they both said at the same time, and then they each tried to explain his adventures over the sound of the other relating his.

Meanwhile, Raph's slugs hopped down and mingled with Don's, and the slugs all told their own stories to whichever slugs would listen and in general they communicated with each other much better than the turtles, who had both been speaking for about five minutes before realizing neither was listening.

They both shut up.

"It's good to see you man," Raph said for both of them.

"Yeah. Have you seen Leo or Mikey?" Don asked.

"You mean... they're not with you?" Raph looked around, taking in the distinct absence of Leo and Mikey for the first time.

"No. But I'm sure they're here... somewhere."

"Then we've gotta go find 'em," Raph said.

They had sat down to tell their stories, but now Raph stood up and offered his brother a hand up. Don didn't comment that this was absurd, as it was obvious Raph was far more injured and in many more places than Don was, and simply accepted the hand.

"Now," Raph said, "where do we go from here?"

"I..." Don looked in every possible direction, and even some impossible ones, "I have no idea."

"Just wanted to be sure," Raph said, kneeling down and holding out a hand for Friender to jump onto, "Because I do. Actually...," Raph nodded toward the Fandango, " _He_ does."


	17. In One Place or Another

It was all the fault of a large fish.

Things had been going swimmingly until the fish had suddenly decided to see whether or not its fins were capable of propelling it through air as well as water, and had picked for this experiment the spot over which Mikey's Mecha Beast was currently gliding.

By a curious coincidence, this spot was also near a split in the swamp river, one way leading to a series of dangerous rapids, the other down a rather lengthy fall of water that wandered away into the wall of the cavern and disappeared to places unknown.

The result of the flight experiment was obvious.

The fish, of course, couldn't fly. The Mecha Beast, of course, was capsized. One of the turtles, of course, went over the waterfall. The other, of course, was drawn into the rapids. The one that went over the waterfall was slammed into the water below and, of course, couldn't right himself before being sucked into the blackness of the tunnel between caverns which was not a proper passage at all and therefore not on any map. The turtle who went into the rapids was, of course, tossed about wildly for awhile until he managed to grab onto the Mecha Beast which had not only followed him but managed also to resume its accustomed right-side up position.

After being carried several miles downstream, Mikey (the turtle in the rapids) got the Mecha Beast to flounder its way to shore. He looked up and down the river, but there was no sign of Leo.

Mikey stood shivering for awhile, wondering what to do with himself. He could go and look for Leo. He could go and look for Don. Or, just for a change of pace, he could go look for Raph, who was probably wandering about somewhere in Slugterra, very likely punching things he didn't enjoy being near (which, if his perception of things was the same as it had been the last time Mikey had seen him, was probably very nearly everything).

Like a slowly rising sun on a foggy day, it gradually dawned on Mikey that he didn't actually know where he was, or how to get to some place he might be better acquainted with.

"If you're lost, stay in one place, make noise, and hug a tree," Mikey said aloud to Skip the Hop Rock, though it was more for the turtle's benefit than the slug's, "That's what all the TV shows say."

He stood up, looked around, and realized there weren't any trees nearby. This was a problem which none of the TV shows had ever talked about. What were you supposed to do if a tree wasn't readily at hand?

Mikey stood thoughtfully for a moment. He then tried standing heroically. After a bit, he tried standing like a model for an insanely expensive hoodie. None of these stances did him a bit of good, so he climbed onto his Mecha Beast and went off in search of a tree to hug.

* * *

"Wait, you actually _fought_ the Demon Ghoul?!" Don's voice was incredulous, as was the rest of him.

"Yeah, but I couldn't even make a dent in the thing," Raph said, his tone of voice suggesting that the majority of the blame for this could be put on the Demon Ghoul because Raph himself had certainly done his part; it was just that the evil mutated slug had failed to be defeated after he'd done it.

"It's amazing you survived at all," Don told him, "How are you even alive? The thing should have torn you to pieces. Look what it did to me."

"I'm a better fighter than you are," Raph pointed out.

"And I'm always the first to admit that when Splinter has us practice against each other," Don reminded him, "Which of us is better has nothing to do with it. The Demon Ghoul is too fast, too powerful. Raph... you should be dead."

"You sound disappointed."

"I'm not. It's just... it's just...," he realized that he hadn't got anything to say and said it.

Raph declined to tell his brother that, when he'd fled from the scene of battle, it hadn't been to escape. Raph knew full well that he'd been crawling away to die. In the manner of creatures who know they've done everything they can and are now bleeding internally in places which shouldn't be doing that, he had crawled to a quiet, isolated spot and had there remained waiting for Death to show up. But Death seemed to be taking a vacation, maybe on a nice sunny beach somewhere.

Raph didn't know that the mushrooms had worked their healing magic on him, improving his health immeasurably. Because he didn't know they'd done that, he didn't mention it.

"It almost did get me," Raph admitted in a sudden attack of compassion for Don's speechless -or rather gibbering- state, "More than once. I guess I was just lucky."

To avoid misting over and saying anything mushy, Raph turned to look at one of the slugs riding on his shoulder. He stroked its head in the same way one would pet a cat, only with one finger instead of his whole hand. The slug lifted its head and rubbed against his finger in the way a cat would, only without all the shedding hair and unpleasant little nippy love bites many cats apply to the skin when doing this.

It wasn't one of Raph's slugs, but one of Don's.

The slugs had all had an enthusiastic discussion amongst themselves. They had decided that Friender had got the right idea about finding the Shane Gang. Don's slugs decided to extend their manic devotion to Raph, a sort of "any friend of my friend is a friend of mine" kind of thing. They had seen in an instant how much the two turtles adored one another, even if they were now too cool to admit it. It was also evident that Don felt much less tense now he had a brother to stand beside. Don's slugs were all for him being less tense, and took to Raph immediately.

It also didn't hurt any that Raph was one of those all-too-rare-people who instinctively know just how to pet an animal so that the animal's muscles all turn to jelly and its face becomes unable to conjure up any expression besides sheer blissful and almost sedated happiness.

"Where are we going?" Don asked, deciding to leave the things he didn't understand in the conversation in favor of other things which he also didn't understand.

"This way," Raph said, managing in almost every possible way to answer the question without actually conveying any information whatsoever.

"I know that," Don snapped irritably, never having managed to learn to enjoy having his questions evaded, "I meant where will we be when we get there?"

He felt that he had rephrased the question in such a way as to avoid any further unpleasantly empty responses. He soon discovered that he was totally wrong.

"Somewhere else," Raph shrugged, then added before Don could really get steaming mad, "Look, I don't know anything about this place. I don't know where we are now, I don't know where we've been, and I don't know where we're going because I don't know about _any_ of the places in... what's it called?"

"Slugterra."

"Yeah, that. All I know is that I've been following Friender's directions since I got here, and he hasn't run me into a wall yet, which is more than I can say for anyone else around here, including me."

Don resigned himself to the fact that they were following the directions of a slug. He had to admit that his choices of direction had led him to being attacked by ghouls, chased by people with pitchforks and also nearly falling to his death. Why not follow a slug? It couldn't possibly lead them to anything _worse_ than what they had already left behind (Don made this judgment based on the fact that he couldn't imagine anything being worse than a Demon Ghoul, and that was somewhere behind them).

"So, Donnie," Raph said, changing the subject, "how did you get all these slugs?"

He gave Don a look that said that he was hoping that there would be -somewhere in the story- an explanation for what had happened to Don's arm, which is what he really wanted to know about but was too cool to mention. With a sigh, Don started to tell his story which he would at the moment have preferred to have completely forgotten but instead remembered every harrowing detail of, and a few of the less harrowing ones too.

* * *

It was all Mikey's fault.

When a fish had jumped out of the water to catch a bug, Mikey had expertly avoided missing it and careened straight (which is a good trick, to be sure) towards it, slamming into the startled animal's gills, flipping the Mecha Beast in a manner fit for 80s Television, as well as launching the thoroughly bewildered fish about fifteen feet straight into the air. As he had been going over the waterfall, Leo had noticed the fish flopping around on a small patch of land, flailing its way back towards the river from which it had been launched, the bug still firmly clamped in its jaws.

Then came the being dunked underwater, spinning in a small whirlpool for a moment, and being thrust into a small, dark tunnel, with barely enough head room above the surface of the water to get a breath without being dashed against the rocky ceiling.

Leo was a superb swimmer (as most turtles are) and, once the initial shock and dizziness wore off, he found he was actually quite enjoying the ride. He told himself he shouldn't be doing that, since this was in fact a very bad situation, but his enjoyment failed to decrease and made it a point to stop listening to anything that he had to say, as it was evident he was just going to be a downer about it.

The river twisted, wound, zigzagged, coiled and braided its way around and through the pitch blackness, sometimes becoming very narrow and deep, other times widening out. The ceiling went up and down as well (or maybe that was the water level), meaning that sometimes Leo could breathe quite freely and other times he banged his head against a rock and was forced to hold his breath underwater for awhile.

Then, quite abruptly, the current spat him out into a larger body of water that he actually recognized.

The swamp river had poured itself out into The Flumes. This was farther along than Leo had been, but it was still very recognizably The Flumes. He wasn't sure why, but this made him feel better. That is, until a tree (which Mikey would have been happy to find) hit him in the back.

Actually it was more of a log, and it was being carried downstream towards a very large wood slicing apparatus. It took a moment for it to sink in that Leo was also being carried in this direction, at which point he drew his blaster along with a shell and fired at the machinery.

It turned out that he'd fired Cappy the Tazerling, who completely short circuited the whole tree cutting line, which gave Leo time to climb free of the murky water and shake himself off.

"That was close," Leo said as Cappy hopped back to him.

What he didn't know was that his actions would soon be causing a ruckus in the tree slicing community, who wanted to know why it was that their trees were arriving in a decidedly unsliced condition. It would take weeks to get everything running smoothly again. But Leo didn't know anything about about the tree slicing community and, if anyone had complained to him, he would have asked them what they wanted sliced trees for anyway.

What he did know was that he'd come down The Flumes. It was a short logical leap to think that going back up them might lead, eventually, to something familiar. Leo didn't know that The Flumes was a staggeringly vast network of watery passages that split off from one another at irregular intervals, going off in a thousand different directions and that it was almost completely impossible to follow them back to their point of origin, which was not at all where most people thought it was.

What he did know was that it was going to be a very long walk. He decided to get started immediately, before he could think too much about the distance he would be walking and get discouraged about it.


	18. Miles from the Road to Nowhere

Don couldn't help but wonder where he'd gone wrong with his life.

Things had seemed to be going along so well, although he wasn't sure when they had been doing that anymore. No, in retrospect, things had never been going particularly well. Or maybe they had been but he couldn't remember that. In any case, they were not going at all well now.

He and Raph had followed the urging of Friender the Fandango slug for what seemed like forever, pausing when they found an abandoned Mecha in a state of severe disrepair. Don had patched it up with junk found around the outskirts of a nearby town and then they had ridden the Mecha Beast.

They had passed by a lot of wondrous sights, most of which Don hadn't bothered to appreciate. He now wished that he had, because then at least he wouldn't feel as if he had been completely wasting his time.

The thing was that Friender had brought them, in the end, to a large mushroom tree. It was a very attractive mushroom, bigger than an oak tree, and sitting on a very nice tower of stone across a very quaint little bridge of the same. It had the most fantastically bizarre base Don had ever seen under a mushroom. But, in the end, it was still a large mushroom.

"A mushroom?!" Don had shouted, "A _MUSHROOM_!? That's it!? We came all this way for something we could have seen all the way back where we started!?"

If he had been an Infurnus slug, Don would have erupted his head into flames of rage. He wasn't and so he didn't, but he took a pretty good shot at it anyway. He could have strangled the slug, if Raph had not at that moment decided to apply a very firm hand to his chest and prevented him from moving towards Friender, who was hopping up and down on the bridge, jabbering and pointing hysterically.

Against the protestations of the Fandango (and all the other slugs as well), they left the Shane Hideout (or, as Don had called it "the mushroom") behind.

Don, fuming and refusing to speak to anyone, had stomped off to a cave and decided that he would live there. The cave wasn't a very nice one, but it was out of the way and its entrance was a sloped tunnel that prevented the outside of it from having any contact at all with the inside. Don sat on the floor of it and began to tinker furiously with the DTD.

He refused to acknowledge any visitors, except to bark at them to get out unless they were bringing something useful in with them, such as food or electronic bits of things that might aid the tinkering.

The apathetic cloud in his mind was back, and obscuring the shattered remains of his new dreams, which were sitting atop the shattered remains of his old ones, allowing him to not quite completely fail to forget them entirely.

Raph saw that his brother was wallowing in something depressing, and refused to wallow in it with him. Afraid the apathy might be catching, he spent as little time in the cave as possible.

Instead, he went out foraging for food and scavenging for odd little bits of things (he always knew when he'd found a good bit because he couldn't, even in his wildest imaginings, see what it might be for). He would bring these things to Don, toss them into the cave, and then leave again.

Sometimes he was gone for days, but Don never seemed to notice.

From time to time, in a fit of indigestion and sleep deprivation, Don would invent something completely unrelated to the DTD and leave it in the cave entrance for Raph to trip over when he returned from wherever it was he went.

When he was able to fathom what use these inventions could be put to, Raph would pick them up and take them with him when he inevitably left again. He rode the Mecha Beast Don had repaired, sometimes for a very long time, searching for the odd bits of things Don wanted and trying very hard not to think about where Leo and Mikey might be.

All this traveling around in big, looping circles actually saved his life as well as Don's.

The Demon Ghoul was trying to track him down and finish what it had started with him but, every time it got a good scent out of the air, the scent was coming from a different direction than the one it was heading, which would send it lumbering off in an entirely new one.

This was less good for the Shane Gang who were doggedly attempting to pursue it, but weren't having a lot of luck because the trail was weaving back and forth more than a drunken bicyclist, and they were fully unable to even begin to consider starting to guess at where the Demon Ghoul was heading.

This was further complicated by the fact that Raph's explorations led him to discover various shortcuts to places, including The Flumes, which he learned to ride on with his Mecha Beast. This meant he could cover vast distances in a relatively short period of time, meaning that the circles the Demon Ghoul and Shane Gang went in as a result of these travels were often very large.

Don wasn't left completely alone in all of this. He still had his slugs, though a number of them went exploring with Raph and managed to save him from many a potential disaster. Whenever Raph returned, the slugs would consult one another about which ones should stay and which should go.

Raph was never in on these discussions, and only found out which slugs were coming when they came hopping after him as he left the cave. He always approved their decisions and appreciated their company. Raph's own slugs always stayed with him, and he even managed to collect a few more as he explored the 99 Caverns and their mysteries.

* * *

Michelangelo was having a marvelously good time.

Something was nagging at the back of his mind like a housewife who had never taken up any hobby other than pointing out the various faults of her husband and his hopeless endeavors to improve -by means of beginning projects and then leaving them half finished in various places- the shambling house the two of them shared as well as busily ignoring all of her complaints that "It wouldn't be so bad if he would just fix the leak in the roof and paint a bit of the siding that was particularly ugly".

Like the aforementioned husband, Mikey steadfastly ignored the nagging.

He was no longer lost, having found a town where he asked the name of the cavern he was in. It didn't matter to him that he couldn't say for sure where this cavern was in relation to any others, only that he could tell people what cavern he was in if ever they asked (which they never did, because they all knew where they were and didn't care that Mikey didn't).

Mikey had so far impressed a goodly number of people with his blaster skills, and gained quite a fan following, as well as having won many slugs and such a large sack of gold that his Mecha Beast had difficulty carrying it for him until he purchased an upgrade for it. It was unclear whether the Mecha Beast was actually stronger or if the sack was merely lighter for having had some of its contents removed in order to pay for the upgrade to the Mecha Beast.

Mikey had found a cavern which had the most sinfully delicious chocolate root beer he'd ever encountered in his life. This isn't saying much, considering that Mikey had never before tasted chocolate root beer. The remarkable thing about it was that it completely stilled the cravings for pizza and junk food he'd had since arriving in Slugterra. It was that good.

Mikey spent a lot of his time trying to drown the nagging from his mind in chocolate root beer, and the rest of it winning various kinds of duels in order to earn slugs which could then be traded in gold to pay for the chocolate root beers. The best part of it was that, because of how the economy of this particular cavern ran, Mikey often won the same slugs over and over, and (though nobody noticed) sold them for the same gold pieces. It was a wonderfully uncomplicated system.

Sometimes, in a sudden heady rush of sugar to the brain without any protein to accompany it, Mikey would launch into a haphazard and hazy description of New York and the weird things that lived there. He always failed to mention that this wasn't somewhere in Slugterra, but the listeners would realize that none of them had ever heard of the place and therefore it must not exist, and would helpfully carry Mikey off to the hotel where he was staying to sleep it off or -as was more often the case- to jump around the room until he felt well enough to come out and talk sense again.

This blissful but somewhat pointless existence was brought to an abrupt end by the arrival of a man.

The man was tallish, squarish, and was possessed of exactly the kind of face that no one wanted to look at for very long. He also had one of the saddest looking slughounds anyone had ever seen, which came dragging in after him when he burst into the establishment that served chocolate root beers as if it had been sat on by a very large turtle and also buried under several hundred rocks.

"I need to fight in a duel immediately!" the man announced to the patrons of the establishment.

The man's hair flew about his head in the same wild manner as his eyes darted about the room.

"Duel? Did someone say 'duel'?" Mikey's eyes snapped up from gazing lovingly at the chocolate root beer in front of him, the rest of his head following shortly thereafter.

"I wanna duel!" Mikey announced, leaping up from his bar stool so suddenly that he tipped over his root beer, "Pick me!" he leaned over and licked the spilled root beer off the bar, much to the disgust and little to the surprise of the other patrons. They'd seen him do this sort of thing before.

"Oh floppers," muttered the craggy faced man, and his beefy shoulders sagged.

A few minutes later, Mikey and the man were outside. A few minutes after that, Mikey had won yet another duel. This was largely because the man didn't actually have any slugs. It had taken so long to defeat him mostly because Mikey was in the middle of a sugar rush and his hand was shaking so badly from it that he could barely aim and missed the man entirely with his first few shots.

"I should have known," the man moaned, "You lot are bad luck. Every time I see one of you, it ends badly for me. Go on, take my blaster, or my Mecha, or my slughound, it doesn't matter anymore. Nothing matters!" he wailed and carried on for a bit, and then went into the chocolate root beer serving establishment and bought himself a drink with the last of his gold in which he intended to drown his sorrows.

The nagging thought in Mikey's mind now had something solid to latch onto. Nagging is always at its worst when it has got a point, and Mikey reluctantly followed his defeated opponent into the establishment and asked him a question that silenced the nagging at last.

"Dude... you've seen other turtles? I mean, ones like me?"

"Oh yes," the man sobbed into his root beer, "the first one dropped a pile of rocks on me and took one of my slugs. The second one sat on my slughound."

"Two!?" Mikey practically squealed, his eyes climbing to heights his head simply wasn't capable of, "You've seen two!? Where!? Show me, show me, show me!"

"I'd rather not, if it's all the same to you," the man said.

Mikey said that it wasn't all the same to him at all. Then, being struck by a wandering bit of genius that had been looking for an unlikely spot to land, he said that if the man would take him to the place he'd seen the two turtles, then Mikey would take that in place of his rightful winnings, as well as pay the man's tab at the chocolate root beer serving establishment.

The man agreed to this, and so Mikey's career as the expert dueler who was constantly on a sugar high and often talked nonsense to the amusement of the townsfolk ended. He signed some autographs on the way out, and that was the last the town ever saw of him.

* * *

Leo was having a time the quality of which was about halfway between the one Mikey had been having and the one Don was currently in the middle of experiencing. How it compared with the time Raph was having is no concern of yours, and makes no difference to the story either way.

He had eventually been prompted into leaving The Flumes in favor of somewhere with adequate food and drinkable water. Not knowing where he was led him to realize that he had no idea when he would reach his desired destination (not that he knew what or where that was), and he decided he might as well take his time about getting there and enjoy at least some of the remarkable scenery along the way.

He stopped in the first town he came to and asked where he might be able to fight in a duel. He was pointed in what seemed like a good direction, and there he went. He won some duels, taking gold instead of slugs as payment, and with that gold he bought for himself a reasonably good Mecha Beast and an unreasonable set of supplies. He then set out to travel cross country.

He encountered many things which were strange and beautiful, some things that were quite dangerous and a few things which were so ugly that it was fantastic to see them. He even ran across a few things which were all of the above, and those were very hard on the eyes.

He wandered through green valleys, meandered through woods and forests some of which were composed of trees and others merely very large, tree-like mushrooms. He stopped in some towns and found that some of them served very good drinks, others very bad ones. He occasionally had duels with people who simply refused to move over to their side of the road until he had beaten them.

And then, at last, he came to a steep mountain. At the top of it was a passage leading to the next cavern.

The mountain was very tall and extremely rugged, and deeply offended that someone was climbing about on its face. To express this discontent, it rained down a mixture of avalanches and rock slides, and occasionally set some kind of buzzard on the traveler, which would peck at him until he threw it a piece of bread and pleaded with it to go away. Leo did make it to the top of the mountain. And then he went into the passage.

There he found no one. Neither bodies nor souls were in the passage, but he wasn't terribly worried by that. Leo was actually rather enjoying being alone for what he thought might be the first time in his life.

But, at the same time, he was desperately worried about the trouble Mikey might have gotten into in his absence. He had been separated from Don and Raph for so long that he decided it really wasn't worth the effort of worrying anymore. They were either fine or they weren't, and it was unlikely that spending time worrying about which one they were was going to change anything.

He came out of the passage and entered into a cavern which was staggeringly huge, full of light, and almost entirely empty of people, except for a very small town on a very large hill somewhere off to the right. Leo decided to go in a different direction.


	19. Musical Turtles

"Here. Right here. This is the last place I saw one. Can I go now?"

Mikey absently waved the man away, and he went with haste.

Examining the area, Mikey was frustrated to discover that there was no real evidence that any of his brothers had passed that way. He didn't really know what he'd been expecting. Some sort of brightly colored neon sign pointing him in the right direction, he supposed.

"Ah shell," he very nearly said, until he realized that this was not an epithet he was familiar with and thus he had absolutely no business saying it, and so he didn't.

He wandered around aimlessly for a bit. He discovered a small hole and crawled into it. On a little flat area near a sheer drop, he peered down at some glowing mushrooms. They weren't very interesting, so he decided to crawl back out of the hole and find something else to do.

As he emerged from the hole, he spotted a slug hopping along the ground in a very brusque, businesslike manner. Here was a slug that knew where it was going, and was extremely serious about getting there. Here was a slug which had been fired from a blaster and, for whatever reason, had been unable to return to its master directly and was now probably on its way home.

Skip, standing on Mikey's shoulder, chirped and waved.

The slug paused, and returned the friendly chirp. Evidently, they knew each other. The two slugs hopped to a point halfway between where they'd each started and chirped at each other. At first they seemed to be catching up on old times and discussing the weather, but then they became very urgent in their communication until Skip suddenly looked up at Mikey with a pleading, watery eyed look and pointed at the other slug, which hopped sideways and then waved a beckoning appendage.

Mikey shrugged, "Lead the way, little dude."

He had nothing better to do.

Mikey didn't know it, but the slug he had just come across was Donatello's Flaringo, Leader. Leader had been traveling with Raph but, after unavoidably landing on the opposite side of a chasm from which he'd been fired, found himself heading home alone ahead of schedule.

He (Mikey, that is) arrived at what he first took to be a rock wall, but eventually realized was a well concealed entrance to a cave. He went in, tripping over some sort of invention on the way.

"So, uh," Mikey cleared his throat and looked around the cave, and addressing the Flaringo "This is where you live? It's... uh... nice."

He wondered if slugs could tell when people were lying to them. He wandered further into the cave. He tripped on something else. But this time it wasn't an invention. Or rather, it was an invention, but not an especially recent one. What it was, was this: a Bo Staff. Donatello's Bo Staff, to be precise.

"Hey look, D's Bo. What's that doing here?" Mikey picked it up and scratched his head in whatever the opposite of a thoughtful manner is.

The thought that Don must have been here slowly crawled across Mikey's brain, fell out his ear, landed on the ground, struggled feebly like those roaches who come in and die on the bathroom floor in the winter, and then gave up and expired. Mikey failed to notice it in any meaningful way, and also didn't stick around to see if Don would come back, instead immediately setting out again, tripping on the newer invention again on the way out.

Leader hitched a ride, having no compelling reason to stay being as the cave was devoid both of his beloved master and his fellow slugs, all of whom had gone chasing after Don when he had been compelled for whatever reason to leave the cave in such a tearing hurry that he neglected to pick up his Bo.

Through much concentrated effort, Leader managed to point out the fresh tracks of a Mecha Beast to Mikey.

Neither comprehension nor astonishment crossed Mikey's face. Still, the slug seemed to want to go that way, and Mikey had no reason to avoid doing that, and so consented to follow the trail in the hopes that it would lead somewhere fun.

* * *

The reason Raph had for firing a Flaringo was lava bats. A Flaringo was not really the best defense against lava bats, but it had been the first slug Raph grabbed, and it had done well enough for him to get out of the area relatively unscathed.

"See ya back at the cave, Leader!" Raph had called to Leader, who was already hopping down one of the holes slugs routinely leaped into when they were going to travel a long way.

Raph didn't know what was down there, but he suspected it must be some kind of slug expressway.

It had been worth it to fight off the lava bats, because Raph had found a neat slug whose use he didn't know yet. It was a Forgesmelter, and just a little bit standoffish. But it had been curious enough to let itself be picked up and, as nearly all slugs did, was getting along well with Friender. By the time Leader encountered Mikey, Raph had left the Magma Caverns for cooler, less lava bat infested areas. Unfortunately, it was not a safer cavern that he entered into.

As he entered the cavern, a volley of ghoul slugs flew his way. Knowing his Mecha Beast couldn't dodge with enough speed and refinement to be worth the effort of trying, he abandoned it and leaped to a new position on a slab of rock standing a few feet above ground level.

The Demon Ghoul towered a few yards away. Somehow, he didn't know how, it had found him. Raph wanted nothing to do with it. He was always up for a fight, but not with that thing. Not by himself. Not again.

He ran, ducking, dodging and weaving, around the perimeter of the cavern, seeking the hole he knew was there and then dropping into it when he found it. He tumbled gracelessly down it, landed on a narrow ledge, hopped down this to another, and then a third, fourth, fifth and sixth, and finally dropped through the roof to a cavern below. As it happened, he landed right on top of Eli's head, knocking The Shane off his Mecha Beast.

Raph was on his feet in an instant, twin sais drawn. He found he was surrounded. And the people surrounding him had blasters drawn.

"Hey, easy!" Eli called out, "It's one of the turtles."

Raph wasn't sure whether to feel relieved or threatened by this statement.

"So it is," Pronto said, putting away his blaster, "And which one might you be?"

Raph declined to answer, holding his sais tighter and growling slightly.

"Easy," Eli said, this time to Raph rather than his gang, "We're friends of your brothers. Leo and Mike."

"Mikey," Trixie corrected, "Leo called him 'Mikey'."

"You must be Raphael," Eli guessed, "Leo said you're not really a people person."

"And you're who?" Raph asked coldly, deciding that was close enough to confirming the guess.

"Eli. Eli Shane. This is my gang. Trixie, Kord and that's Pronto."

Raph blinked. It was pretty clear that the names were meant to jog his memory of something. But whatever it was must have been busy eating potato chips and watching a marathon of its favorite TV show, because it absolutely refused to have anything to do with jogging.

"We've been looking for you. Kind of," Eli went on.

"Well ya found me. What do you want?" Raph flipped one of his sais.

"It's more about what you guys want," Trixie said, "We know you're not from here, and we want to help you guys get back. But..."

"We got separated from Leo and Mikey," Eli jumped in, "Haven't seem 'em since. They found a trail they thought was put down by your other brother... Donald?"

"Donatello," Raph snapped, refusing to be won over.

"Right. While they went to do that, we kept following the trail of the Demon Ghoul, which-"

"-is a product of Dark Water and Mutagen. Yeah, been there, fought that," Raph growled.

He put away his sais, which was as close as he was going to come to acknowledging their friendship.

"You plannin' to take it down?" Raph inquired.

"Well... something like that," Eli said hesitantly, "It's been destroying towns all over Slugterra."

"I am _so_ in," Raph smiled suddenly, which seemed more menacing than his drawn sais had earlier, "and I know just how to find the thing too."

Eli wasn't sure why, but suddenly he understood what it felt like to be a slug who had been sitting on a leaf when the inoffensive piece of flora was abruptly knocked from under him and sliced to pieces. Being unable to reconcile this feeling with reality as he knew it, he decided not to comment and indeed tried very hard to forget it as soon as possible.

* * *

"Oh great. I suppose you'll want to take something of mine or have me take you somewhere or something just like the other three, won't you?"

"Um... no. Actually, I just wanted to know if you knew-"

"You're sure? I've got some gold you could take away. You can sit on my slughound, if you like."

"I'd really rather not. I just want-"

"I've got some lovely odds and ends strapped to my Mecha Beast. You're sure none of them are yours?"

"I'm sure they're great. But I'm not looking for-"

"Oh floppers. It's my Mecha you want, is it?"

"No, no. I have my own, it's only that-"

"What about my blaster? Would stomping on it make you feel better?"

"I'll just be going... that way."

"Sure. Alright. You just go and do that. Come back when you figure out what it is I've got that you want to take away. I'll just be here... moping. Figure you'll come back when I've finally caught a slug. Oh, I see you're already gone. Well that's just great. I guess it's my dignity you wanted because it seems I've lost that now. Lovely. Fine. What did I ever do to deserve this?"

As quickly as possible, Leo left the tragic figure of a weightlifter and part time steak enthusiast behind him. He fairly quickly forgot about the strange person, and the exchange between them had no relevance to either of their futures.

* * *

"I've got it! I mean I've done it! I mean I've really gone and done gotten it," Don paused to let the appalling grammar stop echoing around the cave and realized that nobody was around to hear it, "Raph! Raph, we can go home! I know how to get us home!"

He ran out of the cave, tripping over one of his inventions in the process, and scanned the horizon.

Raph was nowhere in sight. Don decided to go and look for him and, completely ignoring all of the things wrong with this plan, got on his Mecha Beast (which was one of many things Raph had gotten hold of and brought back to the cave) and rode away, which was how it happened to be that he wasn't there when Mikey arrived a short time later.


	20. Now What?

"So, uh, how exactly are we going to track down the Demon Ghoul?" Eli asked.

After announcing that he knew how to find the Demon Ghoul, Raph had promptly sat down on a mushroom and begun to pet a Fandango slug he'd been carrying with him. He had so far not moved from this position, nor had he given any indication that he intended to do so in the near future.

"We're already doin' it," Raph replied nonchalantly.

"Okay..." Eli wondered if he was dealing with a stable personality, and decided he probably wasn't, "Uh... what are we doing?"

"Minding our own business," Raph said, not looking up from the Fandango, which was cooing happily at the unexpected burst of attention it was getting.

"Uh-huh..." Eli decided that this was not a conversation he could really get into, and he stepped back to let Trixie take over for him.

"Look, I'm all for the kind treatment of slugs," Trixie began, pausing to see if Raph would look at her, which he didn't, "but I don't see how petting a Fandango is going to help us find the Demon Ghoul."

Raph sighed and set the slug on his shoulder, finally looking at the group gathered around him.

"So far, every time I've seen this thing, I've been minding my own business. For whatever reason, it keeps finding me. If we sit here long enough, it will come to us."

"What's it got against you?" Eli hesitated to ask, since he could think of several reasons why someone, especially an angry mutated ghoul, might want to track Raph down and beat him up.

"I dunno," Raph shrugged, "Maybe I insulted it in a previous life... or maybe it just doesn't like turtles."

"So your idea is to just sit here and do nothing until the Demon Ghoul shows up?" Trixie inquired, "Do you have any clue how long that might take?"

"Shouldn't take too long," Raph said, "Why do ya think I fell through a hole in the ceiling?"

"You mean it's-" Kord broke off before Raph interrupted him.

"Yep. In the cavern right above us. Or at least... it _was_."

He offered them that smile that had been so unsettling the first time, and they didn't like it much better now. Either he was naturally unstable, or else the 99 Caverns had not been kind to him.

Either way, Eli thought it was a good thing they'd met Mikey first, otherwise it was probable that they would never have gotten along this well with Raph, who was a thoroughly unlikable sort of person on the surface, and the second layer wasn't exactly endearing either.

The one positive thing Eli could think of to say about him -had a tribunal suddenly popped from nowhere and demanded to know a single good thing about this particular turtle or else they would destroy the entire universe- was that Raph was very good to his slugs.

What he did not know was that Raph was also good to other people's slugs. The majority of the ones he had on his person at the moment were not, in fact, his. About two thirds of them were a fraction of the ones which had been following Donatello around ever since he'd rescued them. Raph was good to these slugs too. Actually, he was just generally well disposed to slugs, if no other beings in the universe.

Aside from that single incident when he first arrived, Raph had not hurt any slugs he'd come into contact with (aside from ghouled slugs, which he could probably be forgiven for hurting since they had attacked him first), nor even threatened to hit them or throw them against the walls or drop them down any mine shafts or anything of the sort since he'd come to Slugterra. This was far better than he would have done with any people had he been exposed to them for the same amount of time.

Raph's trouble was chiefly this: People were stupid, and he didn't know how to cope with it.

Of course, neither did the people who were stupid, but one can hardly expect idiots to spontaneously and without just cause cease being idiotic just because someone with slightly less mental derangement than they've got finds themselves unable to cope with being that much less moronic than other people.

But one must judge Raph fairly. He was doing at least as well as certain historical dictators (who mainly dictated that people they deemed somehow inferior should be shot and who, for no adequately explained reason, managed to convince others that this was a sound strategy), and indeed a great deal better than the majority of super villains inhabiting the cosmos nowadays.

He was also, as it happened, coping with stupidity rather better than one of his brothers...

* * *

Leo liked to think of himself as being really very patient and tolerant. He also liked to think of himself as being something of a hero, though his brothers routinely mocked this particular belief so his faith in it was starting to waver somewhat, especially as the heroic characters he had tried to model his role as leader after had actually proven to be no help at all when it came to strategizing and rallying the troops.

They also did him no good with the trial he was now facing.

He had picked up a person from the side of the road as what had seemed like a simple act of charity. The person had apparently been mugged, their Mecha Beast, blaster and best slugs stolen, and they needed a lift to the next town. All well and good, until Leo discovered this person was also spectacularly stupid, and not inclined to keep this fact to themselves.

"I suppose you're wondering what brings a fellow like me out this way," the conversation had started, and that hadn't seemed too bad to begin with.

Leo glanced over his shoulder at the thin, reedy looking man with the neatly trimmed mustache. There was something not quite right about the man's eyes, but Leo thought maybe it was some kind of affliction that couldn't be helped. He was very nearly right, though while he was thinking of some kind of disease or disorder, the truth was that those eyes sparkled with sheer idiocy and on occasion a little too much to drink.

Many fields of science have tried to define stupidity as a disease and, since they can claim even normal behavior is some kind of disorder having to do with hating one's father, they've done a pretty good job on that front. And yet, it must be said for the sake of those who actually do suffer from brain damage, that this man had absolutely no excuse whatsoever for being as phenomenally stupid as he was.

He had not been dropped on his head as a child, nor had he suffered from being radiated prior to being born. Drugs were in no way involved, and his parents had reasonable IQs for people in their line of work. He had a sensationally ordinary upbringing and absolutely no mental condition which any kind of doctor could study or define on any level.

He was merely one of those people who choose, for whatever reason, to deny the existence of their own intelligence, thereby giving it a complex and making the poor thing spend its nights wondering if maybe there isn't somebody out there who might treat it a bit better. After drowning its sorrows in sufficient amounts of whatever it is that intelligence consumes in order to negate itself, it eventually left him for another body, leaving nothing but a note of apology.

"Not really," Leo said, in response to the statement made several paragraphs ago.

"I'm an insurance salesman," the man said, and nodded to a passing figment of his imagination, "I sell insurance," he clarified, "for slugs. If you've lost your slug unfairly, you can sue."

"I don't think that's how-" Leo didn't get any farther before the man interrupted him.

"You can even sue the slugs, if you like," he hiccuped for no reason.

"Why would I-" Leo didn't get to finish this sentence either.

"Though it's not really worth it. Slugs are notoriously bad with figures and they don't like carrying gold about. Tend to drop it in a hole somewhere and forget about it. Terrible bankers, that lot."

"Well I think-" the man obviously didn't care what Leo thought, because he continued to speak as though Leo hadn't mentioned it.

"Have you ever tried taking a slug to court? Miserable business. For one thing, it's blasted hard to find a judge who'll accept a person versus slug case. Usually open and shut. Slugs never have a very good defense attorney because they haven't the money to pay for one."

"I-" that was all Leo managed to get out, which was fine because he couldn't think of any words to go along with it anyway.

"And then there's a ghastly amount of legal paperwork. And you can't get slugs to sign anything, mainly because most of them haven't any names. But the lack of thumbs has a bit to do with it as well, I suppose. Anyway, the insurance business is awful and I hate it. I'm thinking of going into finance."

"Well I suppose-" Leo didn't really know what he supposed and so he stopped supposing and let the man continue without further interruption.

"It's possible I may go into souvenir sales instead. You know those little cheap fiddly bits of things sold in carts near duels? I'm quite good at knitting. I could sell hats. Hats with slugs on them. Hats with blasters on them. Hats with slingers on them. Fabulous things, hats. Have you ever had one of those?"

Leo declined to say anything on the subject.

"I wonder if anyone has tried making a hat out of slugs?"

Leo decided that he'd just skip being a good Samaritan this one time and pushed the man off his Mecha Beast. The man seemed not to notice this and continued making wild speculations to a nearby bush that looked to him like it might be interested in the future of hat insurance for slugs.

The bush wasn't interested, and it was especially apathetic about a concept for a slugs in hats hat made just for the new Slugs in Hats television show the man had thought of only this moment, but was already planning to patent and sell to the highest bidder.

Leo wasn't sure how Captain Ryan from _Space Heroes_ would have handled the situation, but probably not in the same way that he just had. It probably would have involved a certain amount of slapping and most assuredly would have included some very impressive speechifying.

"I don't think he was really an insurance salesman," Leo said to Cappy, "Do you?"

With a shake of his head and wave of a dismissive limb, Cappy managed to convey that he was not even convinced that the man had in fact been mugged at all and, if he had, he'd probably deserved it.

Some slugs just don't suffer fools gladly.

* * *

Leader was just such a slug, and he was suffering quite badly the foolishness of a turtle whom he was beginning to regret having met. The problem he had with this particular turtle was that it had the attention span of a gnat after it has been flattened by a malicious hand, dismantled by flesh eating ants and then fed to the larva of those same ants, which then grow up to be exactly the same kind of drone ants that the ants which fed them had been. And this is after the entire hill has had acid sprinkled liberally over it and a new, stronger kind of ant has taken over and built a larger -much harder to kill- hill.

In other words, Mikey got sidetracked. He got sidetracked a lot. And, once he was sidetracked, he would focus like a laser upon the distraction, to the absolute exclusion of everything else.

At one point, he had a sudden and unexpected interest in botany. He stood staring at a mushroom, wondering if it was good for eating, until Leader very carefully and deliberately set it on fire.

The interest waned and Mikey resumed his following of the trail.

Within two minutes, he had found an interesting boulder to jump his Mecha Beast off of, and he decided to see if he couldn't make it flip in the air on the way down.

Once the entertainment potential of this particular side quest died, Mikey moved on, and then found something else to fixate upon. It happened again. And again. And again.

But, just when Leader was about to give up all hope, they ran into Donatello, who was in a frantic hurry to go the other way. Don's Mecha and Mikey's Mecha met in the air, collided with a tremendous crash, threw their respective riders and landed in a tangled heap on the ground.

Don didn't wait for Mikey to say 'hello'.

"Get on your Mecha and run!" Don shouted, tugging his own Beast free of the tangle.

"What are we running from?" Mikey asked, in somewhat less of a hurry.

"Just do it!" Don shoved Mikey away.

A ground shaking roar was heard from somewhere beyond the rise Don had just hurtled over.

As the two turtles desperately tried to get their Mechas upright once more, the Demon Ghoul came oozing over the horizon like a diseased moon. It roared again. And then it spat ghouls at them. After that came a rain of dark fire. They got on their Mechas and ran. In opposite directions.

"Come on!" Don yelled at Mikey, "Not that way! This way!"

Mikey changed directions and his Mecha galloped after Don with him on top of it.

"Where are we going?!" Mikey wanted to know.

"Away!" Don shouted over his shoulder.

"I kinda guessed that. I meant... more... less... I don't know!"

"I planted a tracking device on Raph's Mecha Beast. We're getting close. I just hope he's with it!"

"Raph's here too? Cool!" Mikey had evidently missed the bit where they were about to be killed by a Demon Ghoul, and Don was in no mood to play catch up.

They fled on. Eventually, they reached Raph's Mecha Beast, realized it was abandoned, and also that they had nowhere else to go.

"What do we do?" Mikey yelled and, when Don failed to say anything that sounded to him like words, he added, " _Donnie_! What do we _do_!?"

"I... uh... we... uh..." Don stammered.

Then he heard a sharp whistle and looked down. He saw a hole in the ground. It was from this that the whistle had originated.

"Donnie! Get your butt down here!" the voice from the hole sounded a lot like Raph's.

Don decided not to think about the possibility of his being mistaken and, pushing Mikey down the hole first, jumped down into the blackness. A spear of hot flame chased after them.

Less than a minute later, the Demon Ghoul followed.

"Mother of Ghouls!" Pronto shrieked, and it was quite probably the single most intelligent thing that he had ever said in his entire life.


	21. Mother of Ghouls

"Donnie, glad you could join us!" Raph shouted over the sound of the ceiling above their heads being ripped open, "You finished sulking or did you just want me to meet your new friend?"

Don didn't respond to this, partially because he was rolling clear of falling debris, but mostly because he knew Raph's question wasn't being asked in any kind of serious way. The hole in the ceiling was not big enough for a Mecha Beast, and it certainly wouldn't fit the Demon Ghoul. But the Demon Ghoul seemed not to care about this and was rapidly digging its way in.

"I've done it!" Don announced when he rolled over to where Raph was crouched with sais drawn.

"Great," Raph said sarcastically, not really sure he cared to know what it was that Don had done, "and that will help us not get killed in what way?"

"Oh, it won't," Don replied, "I just thought you'd like to know."

"What's he done?" Mikey wanted to know.

"Oh hey, you found Mikey," Raph commented, "Got any more useless things in your bag? A box of candy, maybe? Ooh, or a bar of soap?"

"Raph, stop it," Eli broke in, and then add, "Focus."

"Well at least you managed to find a substitute for Leo!" Don shot at Raph, who merely growled at him, "Because what we really need now is someone who can quote _Space Heroes_ in his sleep!"

"Look out!" Raph plowed into Don, knocking him out from under a large chunk of the ceiling which had gotten bored of listening to them and detached itself to try and find a new spot to inhabit, whereupon gravity immediately invited it to meet the floor, which it did.

The Demon Ghoul crashed down on top of the ceiling chunk, shattering it to bits. The Demon Ghoul roared, first over to its left where Don was helping Raph to his feet, and then over to the right where Mikey was standing uncertainly with one hand on a blaster and the other on a nun-chuck, and then straight ahead, where the Shane Gang stood waiting for it to notice them before opening fire.

Slugs flew in all directions. To be fair, they began their flight all heading in the same direction. But the Demon Ghoul batted two slugs aside in opposite directions, sending one spinning off towards Don and Raph and the other careening into Mikey. It opened its mouth and spat ghouls, which intercepted the other two slugs fired by the Shane Gang. The slug Mikey had been going to fire shot straight through the hole in the ceiling when Mikey was knocked over. Don didn't even get to load a slug, ducking the deflected Shane Gang slug which came his way, while Raph rolled to the side and almost got a shot off except that the Demon Ghoul's tail suddenly swept over, not only knocking him flat on his shell, but sending his blaster spinning across the cave to a point well out of reach.

"Ghouls!" Pronto screeched, "It spits _ghouls_! Nobody said anything to Pronto about that!"

Another round of fire and dodging redirected shots as well as ghouls and sharp ended limbs brought turtles and Shane Gang together behind a rock formation.

"Where is it getting all the ghouls from!?" Trixie shouted, surprised when she got an answer.

"It's got a ghoul conversion chamber built right into it," Don said, "In addition to six chambers to hold ghouls which can be removed and fired with a flick of its tail, it also has an organ devoted to converting ordinary slugs into ghouls, as well as a secondary throat designed for launching them. It's also possible that it has a venomous bite that contributes to the ghouling process."

"And you know this because..." Trixie trailed off so that Don might finish the sentence.

"Just trust him," Raph interrupted before Don could respond, "He's spent weeks sulking in a cave. He musta done _something_ useful in that time."

"I did. I fixed the DTD," Don insisted.

"Which is really exciting for you, I can tell," Raph spat, "but we have bigger problems now."

"Move!" Mikey interrupted, nudging the others into motion as a variety of ghouls landed nearby and exploded in various ways.

"Eli, this cavern is filling up with ghouls, and that thing doesn't seem to be runnin' out," Kord said.

"It's too closed in here. We need to move somewhere with more space," Eli said.

He fired Burpy not at the Demon Ghoul, but a point near it. Sweeping sideways, Burpy blew a nice firewall to buy them time to relocate.

"Not a smoke bomb, but it'll do," Don remarked as Raph grabbed him by the shoulder (thoughtfully his uninjured one) and threw him (somewhat less thoughtfully).

He hit the ground running, falling in beside Mikey. The Shane Gang had started the retreat and so headed the endeavor, while Raph took the rear and discovered that the Demon Ghoul was really not all that worried about fire. It stalked through the flames, swinging its head side to side, seeking a target.

Seeing the retreating figures, the Demon Ghoul reared its head back and unleashed a storm of ghouls. Raph turned as he ran and offered them a variety of shurikens, followed by Ninja Smoke Bombs. The upshot was that the ghouls dodged the shurikens, only to be blinded by smoke.

"Mikey! Gimme a distraction!" Raph yelled, seeing that the Demon Ghoul wouldn't be slowed hardly at all by the smoke, which would dissipate shortly.

"Me? Why do I always have to be the-"

"Not _you_ , nimrod! The... whatever it is you've got!" Raph had taken in Mikey's slugs the moment he arrived, and knew their purposes, but he had so far failed to memorize what any of them were called.

"Hop Rock!" Don supplied.

"Yeah! That!" Raph agreed, hoping it was the one he needed it to be.

"Oh!" Mikey turned around, took aim, and fired Skip at a point just ahead of Raph.

Raph leaped and flipped over the Hop Rock as the Demon Ghoul was closing, leaving it no time to turn around or even stop before the Hop Rock did, in a manner of speaking, its worst. The Demon Ghoul shrieked, staggering backward from the explosion.

The Demon Ghoul shook its head and surged after its prey, only to find that they had disappeared from view. The group had split up, taking positions on all sides, and some of them had even had time to climb up the rock spires of the cavern and take the advantage of high ground.

A pack of ghouls hopping along behind the Demon chattered and gestured urgently upward. They had seen where one of the escapees went. The Demon Ghoul swept the ghouls into its mouth, swallowed, and then fired them.

But it had picked exactly the wrong target. Eli.

Rising from where he'd been lying against the rocks, Eli raised his blaster and fired Doc from it. The Boon Doc plunged into the pack of ghouls and there was a frenzy of activity, followed by a broad, brilliant light wave. A handful of cured slugs fell squeaking to the ground, and Doc landed among them.

Fury erupted from the Demon Ghoul, who lunged for Doc in a blind rage. Doc hopped sideways, then fled for his life. The Demon Ghoul didn't mean to convert him; it meant to destroy him.

"Yo! Ugly!" Raph jumped from where he'd been crouching in the shadows and, because he was out of shurikens, threw a sizable rock at the Demon Ghoul's head.

It swung towards him with an angry roar, blasting hot fire at him and forcing him back into cover. But when it looked back to where Doc had been, it realized that another turtle had darted out, snatched up the Boon Doc and hauled him away.

"A healer," Don said, looking at Doc, "Interesting. Unfortunately, it doesn't look like you're powerful enough to cure _all_ of the ghouls at once."

He was distracted from his speculation by an outcry from across the chosen battle area.

"There's too many!" it was Trixie, and the remark had to do with the number of ghouls that the Demon Ghoul was throwing in her direction.

Just as her position was about to be overrun, a Tazerling shot through the air and applied itself ferociously to the Demon Ghoul's face, surging with every ounce of electricity it could muster, causing the Demon Ghoul to rear, stagger backward, and claw at its face. It caught the Tazerling and sent the slug spinning away. The Tazerling hit the ground with a yelp and bounced several feet before it was picked up by the slinger who'd shot it.

"Did I miss anything?" Leo asked, settling Cappy into a shell.

No one had noticed him arrive, but they weren't all that surprised to discover that he had. Leo was always available to participate in a boss battle.

"Oh nothin' much!" Mikey said, leaning out from behind a rock to shoot at some ghouls which were sailing in his direction, "Just the part where Don fixed something and the Demon Ghoul makes other ghouls inside itself by eating them."

"So things are pretty much normal then?" Leo said, leaping for cover as several ghouls came at him, "Oh hi, Don," he added as he almost crashed into his brother, who was trying to occupy the same space that he had chosen to hide in, "I see you met the Shane Gang. Is that Doc?"

"Is that the name of this slug?" Don asked, and Leo nodded, "Then yes."

"I have an idea," Leo said, "We've got more ghouls than Doc can possibly cure by himself, right?"

"What? I don't know. Probably," Don responded, but Leo wasn't listening.

"But all we really need to do is, in a manner of speaking, kill the source."

"I don't think-" but Leo was really warming to the idea and wouldn't be deterred.

"I've been thinking about it. The Shane Gang says the ghouls are acting strange. Coordinated, cooperative. Apparently it's not normal."

"The Demon Ghoul may be in some kind of telepathic contact with them, guiding their behavior," Don said, "But I don't see what that has to do with-"

"So we hit it with Doc. He cures it, and that should, hopefully, cure all the ghouls it's made."

"That would make sense," Don said mildly, then shouted severely, "if we were living in a _cartoon_!"

They had to break and find a new piece of cover before resuming.

"You got a better idea?" Leo inquired.

Don admitted that he hadn't.

"Hey, Raph!" Leo yelled.

"Yo!" came a response somewhere on the other side of the Demon Ghoul.

"Clear me a path to the Demon Ghoul, will ya?"

"You got it!" Raph shouted, then turned to Kord and Pronto, who were nearby, "You heard the turtle."

"Pronto does not take orders from turtles," Pronto said, then yelped because Raph had lifted him by the collar.

"You'll take orders from this one," Raph snarled, throwing Pronto out from behind cover.

Raph emerged from hiding, firing blind as he ran in the open, drawing the Demon Ghoul's attention rather than actually trying to hit it. Kord and Pronto followed him. The Demon Ghoul lunged toward them, managing to knock down Kord and pin Pronto under one of its paws.

"Hey! That's my friend!" Mikey shouted from one of the spires, and he fired.

All he had left was Floppers, and Crumbs bounced off the Demon Ghoul's head and subsequently splatted on the ground with a soft hiccup. But it worked. The beast was sufficiently distracted for Pronto to dig a hole in the ground and make his escape.

"Way to go, Crumbs!" Mikey yelled, pumping a fist in the air, "Ah!" he added as the Demon Ghoul hurled a vomit of fire based ghouls at him.

"I know we don't know each other," Leo was saying to Doc, "But please, you gotta do this. There's no time to get you back to Eli, so you've got to do this for me."

Doc understood. He always did. Hopping into a shell, he readied himself to be fired by Leo. He didn't know if he could do this. This Demon Ghoul was unlike anything he'd ever seen. And he'd been fired so often recently, he was beginning to flag. But Doc didn't try to tell Leo any of this. Like any good hero, Doc was willing to fight to his last breath to save the world.

Taking a breath and counting to three, Leo plunged from cover, knowing he had only one shot. Doc tensed, as ready as he would ever be. The Demon Ghoul whirled towards the motion it had caught in the periphery of its vision. Seeing Leo, it started to open its mouth to breathe either ghouls or fire on him, but Trixie fired an Arachnet, which threw a web around its jaws.

The web snapped almost immediately, but it gave Leo the fraction of a second he needed.

Doc launched through the air, reached velocity and hit the Demon Ghoul square in the face. It roared and reared up on its tail, snarling and clawing at its face while Doc gathered his strength to try and purge it of the disease which infected it. But Eli could already see it wouldn't be enough.

"Does anybody have a Fandango on them?" he yelled.

Almost nobody did. You could only carry so many slugs, and Fandangos weren't generally useful in battle. Though they energized slugs and could guide fired slugs back to their slingers over long distances, and distract fired slugs from transforming at velocity, they also took up space that could be occupied by other, ostensibly better, battle slugs. Nobody had a Fandango. Except for Raph, who didn't know what it was called.

"Friender!" Don yelled, "Shoot _Friender_ at the Demon Ghoul!"

"Friender?" Raph shouted back, "Friender can't fight!"

Raph had already found that out the hard way, the last time he faced the Demon Ghoul.

"Just trust me on this!" Don insisted, knowing that trust was something which came hard to Raph and thus was an awful lot to ask at this particular time.

Raph looked down at Friender, who had already loaded himself into a shell. Friender chirped and nodded, then bared his teeth eagerly. Reluctantly, feeling rather like he was about to fire a trout directly into the mouth of a crocodile, Raph loaded Friender's shell into his blaster, took aim, and fired.

Friender sailed gleefully through the air and attached himself to the Demon Ghoul's head, landing right next to Doc. The two slugs regarded each other for a moment, and then gathered themselves and gave it everything they had. The resultant light was so brilliant it actually had a physical impact, knocking people, turtles, ghouls and slugs flat on their backs and even shattering stone.

A resonant hum thrummed through and vibrated the air, shaking the cavern and those in it to the core.


	22. Are We Dead?

It was hard to tell if the air was still flashing with spots of light, or if it was just dazzled retinas trying to make sound into light. The ringing in the cavern was almost definitely just eardrums trying to make light into sound. The question on everyone's mind, as spoken by Mikey, hung in the air with all the sound and light and, at first, seemed difficult to answer.

"Are we dead?" Mikey asked, thinking he was sitting up and rubbing his head, though he was actually lying flat on his back just like everyone else and staring at the ceiling, which seemed to have far too many light fixtures for a moodily lit cave.

For a long moment, nobody felt qualified to answer the question. Then two people suddenly sat up.

"Doc!" Eli cried, which Raph echoed with a cry of "Friender!"

The two of them scrambled up and staggered half blinded and almost entirely dizzy over to where they had last seen the slugs they were looking for.

Doc sat up as Eli knelt beside him, then leaned against a pebble with a weary sigh. Friender popped up with a cheerful chirp and hopped into Raph's hand. A third slug moaned and rubbed its head painfully. It was a perfectly ordinary, in no way special, mutated or even slightly evil, Flaringo.

It looked up at Raph. Then it looked at Eli. It crouched low and shivered in terror. It knew what it had done. And it was terrified of what would happen to it now because of what it had done.

There were no obstacles in his way, yet Doc weaved over to the frightened Flaringo anyway and put a reassuring limb on what would have been the Flaringo's shoulder if slugs had had those. Doc cooed in a compassionate sort of way, and looked up at Raph and Eli, as if daring them to punish the slug for what really wasn't its fault. Friender chirped at Raph, hopped down and went over to hug the Flaringo. He looked up at Raph and chirped challengingly.

"I'm insulted that you think I'd hurt him," Raph rebuked Friender.

"Her, actually," Eli corrected.

"Whatever," Raph shrugged indifferently, but he secretly wondered how Eli could tell.

"I don't think we're dead," Leo said, finally having gained enough of his senses to make some sort of determination and answer Mikey's earlier question.

"Is the ground crawling? Or is that just me?" Kord inquired.

"It's the slugs," Trixie volunteered, "Hundreds... thousands of them... millions."

It was true. All of the ghouls the Demon Ghoul had gathered over the last few weeks had converged on this cavern. They were not ghouls anymore, but there were just as many of them. A living carpet of slugs marched around the cavern, trying to make sense of where they were, what had happened, and which way they should go in order to return to their homes.

"I guess we really _are_ living in a cartoon," Don told Leo.

"Uh... Donnie..." Leo said, looking at the Flaringo that Friender and Doc were hugging, "Didn't you say that slug got into mutagen?"

"Yeah, so?"

"Why..." Leo asked very, very slowly, "isn't it a mutant... now?"

"Doc must have cured that too," Eli said, holding out his hand for Doc and the Flaringo to hop into, and tickling the Flaringo under the chin.

"I guess we should count ourselves lucky he didn't 'cure' _us_ too," Leo remarked, testing out his ability to stand and finding it was something he was perfectly capable of doing and wondering that he hadn't even considered the possibility that Doc could 'cure' mutation.

Leo offered Don a hand up.

"Just because you're mutants doesn't mean there's something wrong with you, or that you're sick," Eli said, now petting Doc, "Doc can tell what needs to be fixed and what doesn't. You guys may be mutants, but you're _meant_ to be that way. Doc can tell."

"That actually makes sense... I think," Leo glanced at Don for confirmation, and Don nodded thoughtfully, so Leo went on, "Sometimes mutagen produces results like us. We can think and feel and, like you said, there's not really anything wrong with us. But for some... mutagen destroys their minds, or at least fractures them."

"It wasn't just the Dark Water that made the Demon Ghoul crazy," Trixie realized, "It was also the mutagen. So Doc basically had to cure it twice. No wonder he couldn't do it on his own."

"Friender was happy to help," Raph said, stroking the Fandango, who had climbed up onto his shoulder; Raph then addressed the slug, "I'm sorry I doubted you."

"So we're all here together, we've kept the mutagen out of evil hands, found and fixed the DTD, the Kraang that came with us are gone, we've defeated the Demon Ghoul, _and_ saved Slugterra," Don ticked items off on his fingers, "Does that mean we can go home now?"

"I..." Leo hesitated, looking around uncertainly, "I think... maybe we can."

"But what about our slugs?" Mikey asked, clutching Skip in his hands, somehow having instantly grasped that the slugs wouldn't be going with them, "What'll happen to them?"

"We'll take care of them," Eli said, putting a hand on Mikey's shoulder, "They'll all go to good homes. I promise," he held out his hand, palm up, and Mikey reluctantly let Skip jump onto it, "We'll probably even keep some of them. We could always use more help in the fight against Dr. Black and his ghouls."

"I guess takin' 'em back with us is outta the question," Raph said, a little slower (or maybe just less willing) to catch on than Mikey.

Eli turned to Raph, who still had Friender on his shoulder. Eli didn't say anything. He didn't have to. Raph glanced at Friender, who gazed at him steadily. Raph sighed wearily and let Eli take Friender too.

"They belong to Slugterra," Eli said, even though he didn't have to, "Whether your world is the one over our heads or a completely different universe... the slugs wouldn't belong there any more than you guys belong here. You understand that, don't you?"

"Yeah," Raph nodded, then lapsed into a moody silence.

"Well, Cappy..." Leo said, looking at his Tazerling, "...it's been... actually kinda fun. Give your new slinger a jolt for me when you meet him. Make sure he knows not to take you for granted."

Cappy chittered, gave Leo a parting electric shock and then hopped onto Eli's shoulder.

"You heard him, guys," Don said to the slugs milling around his feet, "You gotta stay here," he knelt down to address Leader specifically, "Take care of them, okay?"

Leader smiled confidently. He'd look after the others. He was a good slug like that.

"Do we need to go back to the place where we started?" Leo asked Don.

"Which one?" Don inquired with an amused look.

"Good point. Forget I asked. Fire it up. Or whatever."

"Okay," Don said, setting the DTD down on the ground, "Anybody who doesn't want to visit New York, stand back at least thirty feet."

Once slugs and people had scrambled out of the way, Don pressed a button and stood up. A few seconds later, the turtles looked at one another, and Mikey asked the obvious.

"Uh... shouldn't something be-" A bright flash of light enveloped them...

* * *

...and he found himself standing alone on a rooftop in New York city, "-happening... oh."

Mikey looked around. It looked like the New York he'd left. All the buildings he knew were where they belonged. They were the right size, shape and color too. He decided that it was time to see if his home was where he'd left it, and also the right size, shape and color.

Down in the sewers, he found Raph, who had been transported to somewhere else in the system, but still in New York at least. In the lair, they found Leo, who had landed in a back alley directly on top of a manhole cover. It took awhile for Don to get back, because he had ended up on top of a bus in Staten Island. But he did, eventually, manage to find his way home, just in time for Splinter to wake up in the morning and discover the four turtles congratulating themselves on getting there.

"Where have you boys been?" Splinter demanded, not sure whether he should be angry or relieved and so deciding that he would be both until an explanation tumbled out.

"We went to a place where people shoot slugs out of blasters!" Mikey said.

"A Kraang device transported us to an alternate dimension," Don said.

"We got lost in a network of caverns. It took weeks to find each other," Leo said.

"We fought a monster, kicked butt, and now we're back," Raph said.

"Ah," Splinter said, taking in all of these statements at once, "Well, that's alright then."

He stalked back to his room to meditate and try to make sense of what he'd just heard. He figured only one of the statements could possibly be true, but it was unlike the brothers to have such wildly differing stories unless at least one was accurate. Their lies were usually rehearsed beforehand. You could almost guarantee they weren't telling the truth if they all said the same thing. Conflicting stories, Splinter could believe. It was the ones that matched which made him suspicious.

"So, what are you gonna do with that?" Leo asked Don, gesturing to the DTD in his hands.

"Put it on a shelf and let it gather dust," Don replied, "and hope we never have a reason to go back."

"But we already have a reason, D," Mikey told him, "There's a cavern down there where they serve chocolate root beer. _Chocolate_. Root beer. It's _ah-mazing_. We _have_ to go back."

"Mikey," Leo said, "We are _not_ going back for root beer."

"Aww..."

Don laughed suddenly, for no readily apparent reason.

"What?" Leo asked.

"I just thought of something."

"I noticed," Leo replied neutrally, "Want to clue us in?"

"I just thought..." Don laughed again, "What do you suppose would have happened if the Shane Gang had wound up in New York, instead of us going to Slugterra?"

"That... would probably have been a lot less interesting," Leo said, "Remember, Eli's from the surface. He could probably have kept them out of trouble."

"Oh yeah..." Don frowned, "Still, I'd like to see him get a cave troll on a subway."

"Hey, where'd Raph go?" Mikey asked suddenly, looking around.

They found Raph sitting at the table in the kitchen area, feeding a leaf to Spike, his pet turtle. He didn't seem to be really into it, like his mind wasn't seeing the leaf or Spike at all. Leo came and put a hand on Raph's shoulder. Raph looked up, at first like he was going to be angry, but then he didn't seem to have the energy for it. It wouldn't have been worthwhile anyway, because Leo wasn't about to make fun of him. All he said was this:

"We'll miss 'em too, Raph. We'll miss 'em too."

* * *

 _ **A/N: Thank you all so much for reading, hope you enjoyed it and see you next time. Goodnight everybody.**_


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